NOTE.  This story was written purely for entertainment and is not for profit, and is not meant to trespass in any way on the holders of the rights to Starsky and Hutch.

All my gratitude to Wuemsel. A wonderful person and an amazingly good writer. She helps me more times than I can say.

 

Hutch´s POV

 

Have you ever wondered? I mean… What that thing called love really is? I have. And I have for long time.

 

Maybe love is what I feel for my parents and sister, and what they feel for me…Okay, things can get pretty rough with them sometimes, but we love each other, I guess. As I loved my beloved grandpa. In fact, when he passed away, I thought that I would die from sadness. Don't tell it to anybody, but despite being already a grown up man, I still miss him badly. Oh hell! Our weekends together on his ranch were, no doubt, the happiest moments in my whole childhood. But my childhood was over, and I still kept looking for it, you know. The answer to my question - what is love?

 

Now, don't get me wrong, please. I´m not one of those pensive and boring weirdoes, who keeps the whole day brooding on the oddest things and asking equally estrange things to the people around. No, nothing more far from reality. In fact I am a very normal guy, even a tough guy; you know. I am a cop and all the scum that I must face day after day in the streets, did make me eventually tougher than before. However from time to time still I wonder about questions like that.

 

By the way. I wanna let you know that I was a normal kid and a normal teenager too. Well, if it´s possible to be a normal teenager... Sorry. Just kidding.

 

Well, coming back to my question, later, when I was already a young man, I met Vanessa. And she was really something! Beautiful, elegant, intelligent, sophisticated. And there was no doubt for me. Finally I had found out. With that woman by my side I would sure get to find out about the real, the authentic meaning of love.

 

We got married, but as soon I´d find out, I couldn't be more wrong!  Just a few years after our wedding, our relationship ended sunk in a black hole of reproaches, coldness and mutual hatred. And one of our bigger troubles (But not the only one, of course!) was my partner, Dave Starsky. The man who would spend more hours by my side than my wife; who would share with me the same sense of duty, loyalty and the same wishes to make a difference in this rotten world. The man who Vanessa couldn´t stand since the very first day they met. But that is another story…

 

Right now you can´t see me, but I am smiling. Yeah. I can't remember my first day with Starsky without having to smile.

 

Starsk and I met at the academy, when we were still just kids really. Turned out that we had to be roommates, and the fact is that we were different as chalk and cheese, but hell! The kid was funny like no other, and brave, and smart. No, not just smart, but the smartest cadet in the whole academy!

 

Sure, he wasn´t too good with the books, but give him a gun, or watch him in a fight in the gymnasium…God! He could leave you open-mouthed, wondering how in hell he could get the upper hand in a fight against a cadet who was twice his weight and height in just a minute!

 

And on the top of all that, Starsk was a true kind-hearted guy, always willing to listen, to help and to share a little of his joy of vivre with any grieving heart.

 

Sorry, looks like I am rambling here. As I was telling you, Starsky and I met each other at the academy. And at first I was a little shocked by his warm personality. It doesn´t happen every day that a guy introduces himself accompanying his introduction with the biggest apple pie I ever saw in my life. Starsk would set the pie unceremoniously onto his bed, offering me, through a mouthful of it, to help myself to a piece.

 

“Want some? It's homemade. The best apple pie that you´ll taste in the whole world, you bet! Aunt Rosie made it for me. It´s t´rrific! I wish I could get more of these pies here! Come on, Blondie! Help yourself!”

 

He didn´t even know my name yet, but he was offering me to share part of one of his little treasures. Somehow even a part of the life that he was leaving behind in joining the academy… I know, I know, an apple pie is just an apple pie, and maybe I´m getting a little soppy here, but I can't help it. That’s how it felt to me.

 

Later, after the real introductions, the baggage’s matter would come. I never saw so much stuff. Big, middle-sized and small suitcases and a few cardboard boxes, clothes and toiletries, comics, a radio, a pile of car magazines, puzzles, a box containing a Monopoly game, a photo camera  and even a model ship! The sight of Starsky stepping into the room half-buried among all his stuff was worth to see! I remember myself hurrying to get some boxes from his grip, wondering how in hell he planned to get all that stuff into his part of the wardrobe and his nightstand drawers.

 

I was about to find out soon, though...Yep. You guess it. Part of his belongings ended in my part of the wardrobe…

 

 

To get used to each other wasn´t easy at first. Starsky was hot headed, stubborn, noisy and bore original street-wisdom, which isn´t always easy to live up to. Nothing to do with all those well-mannered and a little stuck-up boys that until then had been my friends.

 

To deal with me wasn´t too easy either, I guess. Starsk soon started nagging me with my eating habits, my morning health shakes and my yoga Asanas. The first time that he saw me in a middle of an exercise, he stopped in his tracks, and after staring wide-eyed at me, he, shaking my shoulder wise-cracked… 

 

“Buddy? Hey buddy! What the hell are you doing? Are you sure that I shouldn’t go to the kitchen to get a can opener to disentangle your legs?”

 

Oh man! Try to picture it! You are trying to concentrate, to put your mind blank, to meditate for a while, and then your curly-haired, child-like roommate asks you something like that! Of course that was the end of my yoga session for that day. At first I was a little bothered by it, but now…Well, what I can say? That’s how Starsky is. And I wish he never changes!

 

Well, let´s get back to the story. I guess I was rambling again.

 

 Starsky and I grew up, as our friendship did, we finished our training at the academy; we put on our uniforms and started patrolling the streets as rookies first and as police officers later, with different partners for a few years. Along that time and because of all those little things that life throws in all our ways, we lost sight of each other, but our friendship, that strong bond that would had been born during the academy days never broke. Though back then I didn't know that, yet.

 

Then the day came when my wish finally came true and I was promoted Sergeant Detective at the ninth precinct, under Captain Dobey´s command. At first I was just doing boring paperwork and waiting to get an assigned partner to hit the streets with. Then, one morning, when I stepped into the squad room, Dobey stuck his head out of his office, asking me to come in.

 

“Okay, Hutchinson. We got a partner for you.” He said when I went inside.

 

The first sight of the man that had to be my partner from then on was a form sitting in one of Dobey´s chairs with his feets propped onto his desk; a leather covered back and a brown mop of curls. Sure, back in the academy he had had to wear his hair shorter, but shorter or longer, those wild curls were still unmistakable.

 

“Starsky! Mind taking your feet off my desk?” Dobey barked, as my new partner got to his feet, turning to look at me. “Thanks, young man,” Dobey added, going into his father mode. That mode that we soon got to know very well.

 

And then, there he was. Wearing blue sneakers, crummy jeans, his leather jacket and that smile that drives the ladies crazy and that, from then on, would lighten up my day more than once.

 

“Starsky? Dave Starsky? Is it really you?” I asked surprised.

 

“Well, Blondie, seems so. How’re you doing?” he said, reaching out his hand to shook mine, while nonchalantly throwing a candybar wrapper into the wastebasket, missing it as Dobey glared at him.

 

“According to your reports you both got your training at the academy in the same year,” Our superior officer said, reading from a file on his desk. “And you formed a really good team back there. Okay, Starsky, Hutchinson. I hope you´ll be able to keep this good team when you´re out on the streets.”

 

Well, you know the rest, I guess. We began patrolling our beat. Covering each other’s back Sharing joy, pain and grief, building up our careers and our prestige as living legends in the precinct; becoming closer to each other than many real brothers get to be, meeting friends and enemies in our path. We even got the chance to fall in love with some great ladies along the years. But on top of all of this I got the chance to grow wiser and to learn a lot of things from working with Starsky. Things about loyalty, willpower, compassion

 

And do you want to know what the most important thing from all of them was? Finally, from that day on, my unresolved question got an answer. The mystery was solved.  Through a few scaring episodes in my life, I really got to know what love is. When Starsky would put the whole city upside down looking for me, while I was getting increasingly sick from botulism I knew it; when he found me hurt and trapped under my crashed car in that cliff, I knew it too. As well as I knew it when reading his name written with lipstick on the ICU window, while I was dying from the plague, or when he´d put his own career in the line to help me to get free from the heroin addiction that Forest would pump into my body and soul..

 

But it was on that awful day when Starsky shot Bellamy on that roof, giving up his only chance to survive to save my life, and when I caught his limp body in my arms, when I got to know the deepest, overwhelming and most real meaning of love.

 

And know something else? I also learned that love isn’t any abstract and intangible concept. It has a form. Love wears crummy jeans and blue sneakers, a battered but warm leather jacket, filled with his own scent. Love is a shining smile, two dark blue eyes, mirror of a special soul; a hand squeezing my shoulder, a mop of brown curls. Love is an ever hungry guy, who loves junk food, cakes and ice cream; who, like a kid, loves Christmas, birthday parties and presents. Love even has proper name…

 

And his name is David Michael Starsky.

 

THE END

 

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