Alternate Universes

Starsky’s watching Fringe and trying to describe it to Hutch–which leads to discussions on many things, not limited to Quantum Physics, string theory as well as X-Files. Oh, and there’s sex.

Originally published in Venice Place Chronicles IX.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older
And we wouldn’t have to wait so long
And wouldn’t it be nice to live together
In the kind of world where we belong…
Beach Boys

Hutch stood quietly for a moment, watching Starsky watch TV. It was a sight that never failed to amuse him. Starsky completely belayed that old expert Marshall McLuhan. Hutch remembered that in the sixties, media guru McLuhan claimed that movies were a hot medium because they engaged the audience in a shared experience and TV was a cool medium because the viewer wasn’t involved with the picture on the small screen.

The television screen wasn’t small any more.

Starsky leaned toward the sixty inch hi-def plasma screen as if he wanted to insert himself right into the action. He had a bottle of beer halfway to his mouth, but had stopped at the mid-point, too riveted on the program to even drink.

Grinning to himself, Hutch lingered on the familiar details of a man he’d known for over forty years. There were silver glints in his otherwise dark hair and a few wrinkles, but none of that mattered to a man still very much in love with his partner.

Hutch flicked a glance at the actual TV, but didn’t recognize the blonde actress who was speaking in a weird, raspy voice with a stilted delivery. He got the impression that it wasn’t her usual voice from the expressions of the two other characters, a young man with the two-day stubble that all male actors under the age of fifty seemed to sport, and an older man more Hutch’s age with wild gray hair.

“What show is this?” Hutch asked when a commercial for a cell phone company came on. He knew better than to interrupt during the episode.

“Huh?” Starsky hit mute on the remote and swallowed the last of his beer.

“Is this a new series?” Hutch asked. “I don’t recognize anyone.”

“Fringe. I think this is the third season.” Starsky grinned, his dark blue eyes glittering with the fanaticism of a true convert. “Kind of out X-fileses X-files.”

“Aha,” Hutch murmured. That didn’t clear up a thing, but he took a seat on the couch anyway. He’d always been either confused by the seminal sci-fi series of the nineties or too weirded out by the parade of freaky characters to really follow the exploits of Mulder and Scully regularly. And this series was even more so? He was almost afraid to join his partner, but his regular Friday night Skype session with his sister Karen was a wash because she was in London at a medical convention, and he’d finished the last Grisham novel earlier in the day.

The next scene was prefaced with a strange blue tinged print of a six fingered hand that seemed vaguely threatening for no discernable reason. Hutch found himself completely unable to understand the exploits of Peter and Walter Bishop. As for Olivia, she was channeling Leonard Nimoy, judging from her humorously deadpan dialogue.

“Y’see.” Starsky drained his bottle of beer to launch into an explanation of the complicated plot at the next commercial interval. “Walter Bishop figured out how to cross into a parallel universe and tore a hole in the fabric of space and time. Kinda like that multiple universe thing you made me watch with entangled particles and neutrino quarks.”

“String theory.” Hutch sat up straighter now that he had an inkling about the subject matter. Brian Greene’s Elegant Universe, a fantastic exploration of quantum mechanics. Starsky had complained during the entire DVD set, but he’d watched every single episode with fascination. Starsky’s tendency to pretend he didn’t have the smarts for anything more than car repair and firing a gun hid a mind as quick as any person Hutch had ever met.

“See, it’s educational. Fringe is based on real science,” Starsky said happily, focusing on the TV again.

The younger Bishop was talking to the blonde woman. It was easy to see that there was some sort of attraction between them, except for the interloper in her body separating them as a couple.

“Loosely based,” Hutch said, pretending he wasn’t interested in the couple’s dilemma. Olivia suddenly gasped, sounding briefly like a young woman instead of an elderly man, and collapsed into her astonished boyfriend’s arms.

Hutch had always been a sucker for star-crossed, or possibly more to the point, romances that contained obstacles for a couple. At times, they sucked him in. At others, he was far too easily reminded of the difficulties he and Starsky had overcome thirty years ago. There had been so many hurdles to jump over that he was frequently amazed that they’d ever found each other at all. Starsky was his greatest joy, and the love of his life.

Starsky grunted, thumbing the remote to extinguish the massive screen. “At least they’re in the same world right now–Nimoy’s character, William Bell, will find a way out of Olivia. At the beginning of the season, she was on the other side, with Walternate–separated from the…” he laughed, obviously at a loss of how to explain two parallel worlds with a vocabulary limited to a single universe. “From ‘our’ Peter and Walter.” He held up the beer bottle. “I’m gonna get a nightcap. Want a beer?”

“Sure.” Hutch frowned, watching Starsky walk into their well-appointed kitchen. He didn’t just get two Sam Adams, he snagged a sack of Hutch’s favorite popcorn, a sure sign that he was in the mood to talk or make-out. Probably both.

“You ever think about other universes?” Starsky proposed, dumping his load on the coffee table. “I mean, what if there’s really lots of versions of us, all lined up in a row like looking through a bunch of mirrors, only we’re not all quite exactly the same?”

Hutch’s gut tightened, the beer he’d just swallowed sloshing uncomfortably in his stomach. What the hell had brought that on? “Starsky, you know what I think about what-ifs.”

“They strangely compel you to get annoyed, even when you can’t stop thinking about ’em,” Starsky said astutely, waggling his beer bottle at Hutch.

Starsky had effortlessly hit the nail on the head. He knew Hutch far too well. But Hutch knew his partner, too. Starsky might be more facile with the non-sequiturs and flights of fancy, but Hutch could argue arcane premises.

“As a scientific quandary, I find the whole study intriguing, but as for conjecture on whether marrying an Adams would have caused you to be a doctor….”

“Ever gonna ever let me live that one down, huh?” Starsky kicked Hutch’s sock-clad ankle with his bare foot and waved the beer of the same name at him.

“I’d rather speculate on facts and evidence based theories,” Hutch finished with satisfaction. Quash that one, Einstein. “There’s no unifying theory yet, no Higgs Boson particle, no black hole created out of anti-matter to suck in CERN and the rest of Europe.”

“You scoff, but according to that Greene guy, a percentage of the scientific community believes in the whole parallel universe thing.”

“You were actually paying attention to The Elegant Universe?” Hutch asked, honestly surprised. He knew Starsky could comprehend the complexities of string theory and Quantum Mechanics. Starsky was far from stupid.

“Yeah, it made a lot of sense, actually.” Starsky contemplated his beer for a moment before taking a slow suck. “What really boggles my mind is the whole thing that every single thing we do makes another branch in life. So even if four other guys in four other universes were born on the same day as me, in the same hospital, with the same parents, Ben and Esther Starsky, that we wouldn’t be exactly the same, not really.”

“Experience changes with each step,” Hutch said very softly, his heart suddenly pounding. A horrible staccato beat of gunfire and the loud screech of metal against metal filled his ears and he had to squeeze his eyes shut to cut off the rest of the flashback. Over thirty years and it still had the power to make his guts wrench. Starsky had survived, damn it, survived and thrived.

“Hutch?”

Drawing in a shaky breath, Hutch dipped his hand into the bag of popcorn, running the fluffy popped kernels through his fingers before pulling out a handful. Delaying tactics. He was almost afraid to admit his lapse from so long ago. Starsky’s inquisitive blue eyes were on him, probing gently into his few remaining secrets.

“What you thinking about?” Starsky asked carefully.

“The day you were shot…” Hutch choked on a piece of popcorn and had to gulp beer, sputtering when it lodged in his chest for a moment before going down. Or maybe that was just the fears clamped around his heart since 1979.

“We’re talkin’ about physics and you come up with bullets?” Starsky frowned and then flipped his hand in a do-over motion. “Okay, that came out wrong, cause, yeah–I do get the connection between physics and bullets. Speed, velocity, and all that jazz, but why’d it make you think about bullets?”

“Not bullets so much, as a different ending to the story.” Hutch touched Starsky’s chest, exactly where he knew the scars were underneath Starsky’s vintage Earth, Wind and Fire t-shirt. “It started when you were in the ER, and then the OR–hours when I didn’t know which way the pendulum was going to swing.” He tried to shake off the memories, but once started they had to play out in his head to the end. Even with the beat of Starsky’s heart under his palm, the terrors of that day wouldn’t stop. “And I stopped believing in us, because I was so afraid and I could so easily see the alternate path.”

“With me dead,” Starsky whispered, gripping Hutch’s wrist. “Damn….”

“There were many versions, all with the same conclusion.” Hutch turned his hand over so that it covered Starsky’s, and they interlaced their fingers. Hutch raised one. “You survived surgery, but died in recovery and I never got to see you alive again. I chased down every clue until I got to the assassin, I didn’t know it was Gunther yet, and I shot him.”

“You don’t have to tell me…” Starsky started, kissing Hutch’s wrist and then the pointing finger.

“I think I do.” Hutch inhaled, surprised to find that the ache inside had lessened. So many years he’d held onto this weight, a stupid, nonsensical weight when all was said and done, because the proof of Starsky’s life had been right there the entire time. “My least favorite version didn’t even correspond to the actual facts at all. I started to think you’d already died back at Metro, in the parking lot, but no one had the nerve to tell me yet.”

Starsky had tears in his eyes, his mouth slightly parted as if he wanted to say something to make it all better but couldn’t find exactly the right words. “I want to go back in time and throw my arms around you, tell you it would all be better. That we’d see what idiots we’d been for so long and get it on.”

“You mean be like Marty McFly and knock some sense into us before Gunther forced the issue?” Hutch asked, the remnants of his flashback dissolving like bits of paper after a rain.

“You saw the wrong future, babe.” Starsky touched Hutch’s temple with his forefinger. “I used to want to believe in all those fortune tellers, you know? A flip of the card and we find out what happens to us for the rest of our lives.”

“And then you met Madame Yram?” Hutch teased.

“Nah, then I met you.” Starsky shrugged, threading his fingers through Hutch’s thinning hair, massaging his scalp exactly the way Hutch loved.

“You met me?” It was difficult to carry on a coherent conversation when Starsky was kneading the intelligence right out of him. Hutch felt like he could melt into a pool of ooze on the carpet. Far too X-filey for his imagination. He captured Starsky’s hand and plunged it into the popcorn.

“This old woman in ‘Nam, she told me my fortune.” Starsky ate a couple of popped kernels thoughtfully. “Me and a couple buddies were in Saigon for R&R. Got drunk, went to this old woman. She fed us the usual crap–you will get rich, famous, etcetera.”

Hutch nodded, listening quietly. Starsky rarely spoke about his time in country.

“Except not one thing she said came true. Not one.” Starsky chuffed a mystified laugh at his own gullibility. “Hill died only a week later. His jeep blew up. Mulcahey lost a leg two months after and went home. Not famous, not rich–I used to see him sometimes when I was still a rookie on the force, down by the docks, all wild hair and crazy eyes, his mind trapped in ‘Nam.”

“Starsk….”

“She’d told me I would go back to the US, meet a woman and get married within a year.” Starsky bounced the remaining pieces of popcorn in his palm. “I met you, less than a week after I got back–full of anger, full of–I don’t know, stuff that I couldn’t get out of my head.”

Hutch flashed on that Starsky, gaunt and guarded, his eyes blazing, the pain of his humanity only glimpsed in momentary flashes that had seeped into Hutch’s soul. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Somewhere, in one a those alternate universes, there’s a Dave Starsky who ended up like Mulcahey,” Starsky said tonelessly. “I think he mighta blown his brains out with the gun he smuggled back from ‘Nam.”

“Don’t do this…” Hutch tried to wipe away that version of the truth as if it were chalk on a blackboard. How had they gotten so far off from a discussion about Fringe and quantum physics?

“Maybe,” Starsky continued, “one Dave married a nice Jewish girl, had a son and two daughters, and ground himself into the dirt driving a hack to and from the airport. Maybe he even picked up a Hutch, married to this bombshell Vanessa, and they never even made eye contact.”

Hutch ached for those Starskys, the ones he’d never met. And for the Hutch too caught up in his trophy wife to see the person who could give him life.

“Hutch, I always believed that you changed my future, right from that very first day.” Starsky brushed the back of his knuckles over Hutch’s thigh. “Gave me a different road to choose.”

“Do you still think it was the right choice?” Hutch asked, haunted by all the different realities. “When you were shot four separate times on the police force, not to mention….”

“Yeah, because no matter what, you were with me.” Starsky grinned, not the one-hundred-fifty watt standard that lit Hutch’s life, but the sweet, vulnerable version Hutch had seen in that bar the day they met. “And, of course, neither one of us will ever know how things would have been different if….”

“But I do know,” Hutch said slowly, all the terrible scenarios he’d imagined while waiting in the corridor outside the operating room coming back to him. “I’ve seen them over and over again in my dreams, and none of them were good.”

“Shows you that we belong together,” Starsky said confidently. “Infinite possibilities, so many versions of reality. We grabbed the gold ring.”

“You mean, of all the gin joints in all the universes of all the Bay Cities, you had to walk into mine?” Hutch deliberately misquoted.

“That’s my line.” Starsky burst out laughing. “Guess you were payin’ attention when we watched Casablanca.”

“Hate to break it to you, slugger, but I’d seen that movie before–more than once.” Hutch winked, the momentary anxieties melting away. “Probably in all…” he waved his hand in an expansive gesture, grabbing a number out of the air. “Forty-two universes.”

“Forty-two, huh?” Starsky captured Hutch’s hand to kiss it and then tickle the palm with his tongue.

Laughing, Hutch said, “According to some, that’s the meaning of life,” just to mess with Starsky a little. And prove he had some pop-trivia cred. He’d read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

“It’s also Mulder’s apartment number,” Starsky put in, his eyes lit from within, his smile wide. “What if we could see them all, lined up like reflections of each other, each just a little bit different? Do you think we could–like Olivia and Peter did on Fringe, walk between and meet our…dopplebangers?”

“Doppelgangers.” Hutch pulled his hand away, intrigued nonetheless. “I doubt that’s possible with current scientific methods.”

“I don’t think it would work, either,” Starsky mused, surprising him. “What’s that theory when because you’re watching something, it changes because you were looking?”

Unraveling Starsky’s more convoluted sentences sometimes boggled Hutch, but he knew exactly what Starsky was referring to. “You’re thinking of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal, although it’s not exactly apropos. But I get what you mean; just the fact that we stepped into one of the other Hutch’s–”

“And Starsky’s–”

“Worlds.” Hutch nodded. “We’d alter events. Our being there changes the outcome.”

“But, here’s that paradox thing.” Starsky tapped the air with a forefinger as if indicating something on the blackboard Hutch had erased earlier. “Nobody’ll ever know how it would have been if we hadn’t been there, so maybe we didn’t change a thing because we were supposed to have been there right then to–” he clapped his hands together. “Unite some other Starsky and Hutch.”

“Starsk, you’re making my head hurt here. It’s a mobius strip, spinning ever wider because each possibility creates another exponentially.” Hutch moaned. Perhaps it hadn’t been wise to expose Starsky to the many worlds interpretation.

“But…?” Starsky coaxed.

Miming time-out, Hutch mentally followed Starsky’s puzzle to the center and parsed it carefully out, examining all the angles. He took a drink of beer, peering at his imaginary construct from one side and then the other. Starsky tossed a few pieces of popcorn into his mouth, his eyebrows peaked with interest.

“Once,” Hutch started, “any version of those Starsky and Hutches is seen, then nature is forced to make a decision, and every possible outcome does become reality.”

“Becomes one specific reality,” Starsky countered softly. “You and me, together, not married to Vanessa, not dead in ‘Nam.” He didn’t have to move more than a few millimeters to meet Hutch’s lips and kiss him passionately.

“Detective partners and then life partners,” Hutch finished when he had breath to speak. The kiss had been a very, very good one. He swooped in for a repeat.

“Spooky.” Starsky licked his lips with mischievous glee. “I was about to say that. Isn’t there something about two electricons–”

“Electrons,” Hutch corrected automatically. Some things never changed. From Starsky’s laughing eyes, he suspected strongly that Starsky had misspoke intentionally. Never failed to turn him on. He was so easy. “I take it you’re referring to spooky action at a distance.”

“When two things…” Starsky folded down his middle three fingers, waggling his thumb and pinkie between the two of them like a Hawaiian surfer greeting. “…electrons, quarks, cops do the same thing; know what the other is thinking even though they’re not physically attached…” He looked down at Hutch’s lap as if surprised to find the crotch of his old pajama bottoms rising like a tent pole.

“Very spooky.” Hutch placed his hand over Starsky’s prominent erection poking through his threadbare jeans. “It’s like we were joined at the hip.”

“You musta read my mind!” Starsky chuckled, slowly divesting himself of his jeans. “Want to try a couple of practical experiments?”

“You mean like a game of pool?” Hutch asked, acting deliberately obtuse. “Kinetic energy and measuring the force of a rigid queue when it hits a ball?”

Starsky gave him the stink eye. “Not sure we have the funding for field study, babe, I thought we could try building up some friction.”

“Ah, ha.” Hutch nodded soberly, delighted at Starsky’s ingenuity. He tugged at the bottom of Starsky’s pants to pull them off his feet. As usual, Starsky had nothing on underneath. His cock bounded free as if anxious to join in the fun. “Rubbing two sticks together?” he proposed, shucking off his pajama bottoms. “Possibly attempting to make a little static electricity.”

“Hair raising idea.” Starsky smirked, grabbing Hutch’s hand to drag him into their bedroom.

Hutch approved. They were no longer quite agile enough to cavort like eighteen-year-olds on the sofa, legs akimbo and backs bent over the cushions to get at each other’s privates. Their California king was big enough for two men, slightly paunchy and a bit creaky, but still hot to jump each other’s bones.

Starsky dropped back onto the mattress, dragging Hutch with him, laughing for the sheer fun of it. Snaking out of the Earth, Wind and Fire shirt with a shimmy that cranked Hutch’s motor into high gear, Starsky rubbed his hands together until the palms were warm. He wrapped both around Hutch’s shaft.

“Damn!” Talk about a hot medium. Hutch gasped, going onto his side to give Starsky enough space.

Fluttering his fingers down the vein in the back, Starsky pumped Hutch just enough to rev him up even higher and then crawled in very close, shoving his cock against Hutch’s.

Instant conflagration. Hutch sucked air, feeling the atoms and molecules dance when Starsky’s soft/hard, incredible pulsing length ground against his.

Eyes closed, Starsky rocked slowly to increase the contact, panting when Hutch clutched both cocks in his hands to lock them in sync.

“This is it, babe,” Starsky whispered, opening his eyes wide.

Hutch felt their particles interface, combine, re-assemble, and disperse, leaving him charged with new life. Worlds collided and universes expanded. Starsky arched, collapsing onto Hutch, panting as the orgasm swept through him.

“Wow. I think…” Starsky reached out to pat Hutch’s sweat damped singlet. “You could have been a physics prof in another life. You know your chemistry.”

“You are aware that’s two different fields of study?” Hutch said in his most lecturey tone. He raised his eyebrows, looking down his nose at Starsky which made him go all cross-eyed. Both Starskys smirked in response.

“Double majors, babe.” He rolled onto Hutch, kissing him roundly and grabbed the TV remote on the bedside table. “What say we watch a couple more episodes of Fringe on the on-demand?”

“To promote a further investigation into viable interpretations of alternate universes.” Hutch nodded enthusiastically. “However, our data set is too narrow, we’ve only got access to a limited supply.” On-demand only provided five recent episodes to view. “Not enough to quantify our research adequately.” But certainly enough to give ample occasion for field study on his partner and examining the effects of kissing Starsky during commercial breaks.

“We might actually have to dig into a few old X-Files since I’ve got DVDs of those.” Starsky waved the remote like a wand to turn on the television on the opposite wall. “To compare and contrast, if nothing else. I know you don’t like the scarier ones, with that liver eater and the–”

“Starsky, I was a cop. Vampires don’t scare me.” He actually remembered watching that one. Hutch bunched up the pillows behind him so he’d be able to see the TV screen. “You on the other hand….”

“Huh, you’d better be careful. Remember that vampire did bite me.”

Starsky winked rakishly and Hutch did have to kiss him on the neck, using a bit of teeth. Starsky chuckled and elbowed him in the ribs.

“Thirty-four years ago,” Hutch retorted, regarding the hickey he’d made with a certain amount of pride. All the morbid memories of Starsky’s shooting had receded into the past, where they belonged. He liked the present, liked his life with Starsky. Relished the mind-boggling discussions Starsky dredged up. Kept life more than exciting. Made it fun.

“Time is relative, Einstein. Could be the universe folded in on itself and that only happened yesterday.” Starsky wielded the remote with the skill of a virtuoso. The listings for Fringe popped up on the screen.

“Could be a simpler reason. Old age. Your memory’s shot.” Hutch studied the selection, intrigued. He really was going to have to go back and watch this damned series from the beginning. How to do that without letting Starsky know that he’d been suckered in once again? Time to order something esoteric from Netflix as a strategic move. He already had the intriguingly titled What the bleep Do We (K)now!? at the top of his queue. That should work to his advantage. “How about this one? Lysergic Acid Diethylamide?”

“Get ready to turn on, tune in, and drop out,” Starsky drawled Timothy Leary’s old mantra, kissing Hutch’s shoulder as he snuggled up next to him. “Walter’s taking LSD. And it’s animated.”

A/N — Starsky was watching Stowaway from the third season of Fringe, FOX.