Seconds

What was going though their minds in the seconds after Starsky is shot by Gunther’s goons?

I decided to challenge myself to write a story in second person POV, and this is the result.

Episode-Related: Sweet Revenge.

You can’t help it — you panic when your partner doesn’t respond to your frantic shouts, and as you quickly round the striped tomato, precious seconds getting away from you, you practically leap over the car in your desperate bid to make sure he’s okay.

But then you stop, dead-cold, shocked into silence, when you see why he hasn’t answered you.

******

If you’ve never been shot by three high-velocity bullets at close range, as they tear through your body and violently thrust you to the ground while your partner’s desperate shouts to get down reverberate in your head as your consciousness fades, hopefully you never will.

If those were the last words you heard him say, in the seconds before you hit the ground, and then there was nothing but silence, what would you think?

Would you think the silence was because you were already dead?

Or would you ponder, terrified at the thought, that the reason your partner wasn’t hovering over your body, whispering words of comfort into your ear or gently caressing your cheek, or else shouting frantically for an ambulance, was because the bad guys got to him right after they nailed you.

How would you feel if you yelled out his name, but somehow, no sound came out? At first, you’re confused but then you come to understand that your shouting is only in your mind, because you’re unable to get your mouth to open on account of bein’ almost dead.

******

You stand there, frozen, unable to move, unable to think, as the world you thought you knew comes crashing down around your head, and you feel a loud rush in your ears, like a black tsunami washing over you, carrying you away from everything. And for a few terrifying seconds, your world ceases to exist.

But then reality comes crashing back, knocking you over and forcing you to acknowledge what’s happened, and you realize you’re still standing there, in shock, doing nothing to help, as the cops and paramedics swarm over your partner’s prone body, and you’re not even sure he’s still alive. In fact, you’re convinced he’s dead.

And then someone, perhaps Captain Dobey, grabs onto your shoulders and roughly pushes you into a car where you’re taken, speeding, towards a destination unknown.

And you pray to God that it’s not the morgue.

******

You look up to see bright lights and unfamiliar faces with concerned expressions, but no one will answer your question, no matter how many times you ask. Where’s my partner? Where’s Hutch? Please, I gotta know!

Oh right, you remind yourself — you’re unconscious, so they can’t hear you.

When they finally finish attending to their business, they wheel you down the hallway into another room — a darker room — and hook you up to machines that whir and hiss and you realize that you’re in a hospital. But you still don’t know where your partner is. In fact, you haven’t seen or heard him since his fateful shouting, and you replay his last words over and over in your head — Starsky, get down! Starsky! Starsky! — until you stop thinking of anything at all as your consciousness abruptly shuts off.

******

He’s dying, you think to yourself as you stare at him through the glass. Your mind repeats the phrase over and over again like a mantra. And then you realize you’re giving up on him before he’s even given up on himself.

******

At some point, you suddenly come to, as if you’ve just been startled out of a deep sleep, but as you look around the room, you see that you’re all alone. You shout his name, over and over again, but he doesn’t answer. No one answers or comes to check on you.

Then you remember they can’t hear you and wonder why you keep forgetting that.

******

You walk into his room, shuffling slowly across the floor. Sighing, you lift your hand tentatively to touch him, and then, just as tentatively, lower it to your side, because your spirit is as broken as your heart.

You park yourself on the edge of the chair, afraid to sit all the way back, as if the act itself would confirm the gravity of the situation. Separated from him by the endless tubes and machines, you find yourself sitting several feet away, but you and him might as well be a million miles apart.

And you fear that, soon enough, you will be.

******

You’re drifting in and out of consciousness, with no sense of passing time, but you know in your gut that it’s been way too long since you last heard him. But how long has it been? A day, a week, a month? There’s no way to know. But you know that you haven’t felt him, or even smelled him, and suddenly you begin to panic when you realize that you can’t sense him at all. Not at all and it’s not for lack of trying. Huuuuutch!!!!! You desperately scream out his name, over and over, but he doesn’t appear.

Instead, the doctors and nurses come rushing in, poking and prodding you with all kinds of instruments as they shout over one another and you don’t understand what’s happening.

Your panic escalates and that’s when they bring out the paddles, moving over you ominously as if you were a giant human ping-pong ball. You’re terrified and you desperately want to be somewhere else, anywhere else but here, where your partner is not. And as the electric shocks zap your body over and over, you desperately yell out his name one final time–

And then suddenly, you can feel him. Not physically, no; but nonetheless, you can somehow sense him running towards you. You know he’s out there and so you begin to calm down, and for some reason that calms the doctors and nurses too, because they’re no longer shocking you with the paddles. They whisper closely to each other in hushed tones of relief.

And then he’s there, in the doorway, and you can hear him talking to someone; the doctor, you guess. You can’t see him, though. You can’t see anyone or anything. In fact, you realize you’ve never seen anyone or anything since you’ve been here; you’ve only just been conjuring up their images in your mind as you lay immovable and insensate in your bed.

You imagine that the nurse has short, manicured nails and that her wrist is adorned with a delicate gold bracelet, but you’ve never actually seen her with your eyes, have you? No, you’ve only just seen her in your mind. For all you know, she might have long, glamorous red nails, or maybe she’s wearing the ugliest watch you’ve ever seen.

But your partner — you don’t need to see him to know what he looks like, because his beatific blond image is etched forever in your mind. You don’t need to hear his voice to know what it sounds like, because how could you ever forget the timbre of those velvety smooth yet husky notes?

And you don’t need him to kiss you to know what he tastes like, because you’ve tasted him so many times before that his piquancy is permanently etched onto your tongue like an exquisite tattoo.

You laugh to yourself, because somehow, in your inanimate state, your unconscious mind has accessed all kinds of clever words you never knew were in there. Words like insensate and piquant. Or maybe you always did know them, but just pretended you didn’t — so that you could stir up your partner in that game the two of you always play.

And although you still can’t open your eyes yet, or say his name out loud for him to hear, you know in your heart that you’re going to be okay, because he’s come back to you.