Type: Slash
Summary: How many of each does it take to make a Starsky? Add some Blondies, a Hutch, and stir.
Episode Related: Starsky’s Lady
Categories: Hutch Angst, Starsky H/C, First Time Story, Mystery
Rating: PG

By Vedette Ciel

Narcotics Anonymous, Al-Anon, I should be so lucky. Nope, there is no place to go for people like him, because if I knew of such a meeting group, I would drag him there. At least, that’s what I first thought years ago, until I learned the truth about my over-sentimental partner.

You see, Starsky doesn’t know he’s an arctophile. He’s never heard the definition. But I noticed it early in our friendship. In most windows that sport some, his eyes would roam sideways when we went by. As much as he drinks in the sight of anything in a skirt, this is just as serious. And any time he’d get the chance, he’d stroll over to them, like when we went shopping for Lisa Graham’s birthday at the toy store. He would give them a squish when he didn’t think I’d seen him, but I had.

At fairs and festivals, he’d drive me and my wallet crazy borrowing money to win the biggest one. He’d hustle an unfair advantage at any gun game, against teens a third of his age that only had a few dollars to spend, and no marksman’s skills. Then he’d pick the fattest, fluffiest poof of fur and parade it like a pompadour for about an hour. Talk about mortification of my public demeanor. But he’d always amaze me, finding that tiny child, a little oriental girl, or a saddened boy, and with the gentlest empathy, give his prize away. He couldn’t help himself not helping a child. I held my breath every time he did it.

So it’s no surprise to me he bought Terry one. Terry Rose, her mother called her. Starsky and Terry, the two of them together, it still makes me smile. She was so perfect for Starsky, so wispy and delicate. We all had a way of fitting together that I don’t think will ever be again, with a lady. But after Prudholm’s terror, Starsky just folded into himself, after the adrenaline dissipated, and that monster was sent to a psycho ward. His will was crushed those two weeks afterwards, until that night, that Monopoly game, when I ripped open the paper and met that plush. Starsky took this huge breath, hung on to those beads for eyes. "That’s Ollie, she used to keep him on the bed with her."

That little piece of paper held so much. "Dearest Hutch: To you I entrust Ollie and Dave. Please love them both. Don’t let either one of them change." I didn’t know what she meant, not really. But it was beautiful, cryptic, so like her.

After I read Terry’s note, I was so choked up. He got worse very quickly after that. Thinking he’d break into pieces, I had to get to him, insist he come over to me. I waved my arm frantically and said, "We both need this, Starsk. Ollie’s here, I’m here." He crawled over and curled into a ball in my arms with the bear crushed to suffocation between us. Who was I to tear them apart? I half carried him to his bed and tucked them both in, then returned to blow out the candles and pick up the pieces of paper real estate. I heard him crying, and his heart called for me. I couldn’t let Terry down, not that night. I had a charge to take care of them both. So beside them, I laid me down to sleep, cradled up, their souls my keep. There wasn’t a night for a month that his fur wasn’t against his face, or his curls weren’t against my chin.

It seemed all Rosies cast a spell on him, even when he didn’t know their names at first. His magnetic essence pulled them in like haunted spirits, smitten in no time. No wonder once he was told what her name was he turned harsh on that idiot Goodson. I hadn’t known yet what it all meant to him. But selfishly, I was pleased when that Rosie left, I couldn’t share anymore.

Eventually, I moved in. The love that moved in him became a gift for me. He never could stop being generous, it filled me like unending stuffing, right down to my toes. I couldn’t do without, I always had room for more. He lives for that, always has to put it somewhere, and me, I’m an insatiable worm hole, and I can so live him back. That makes it so paradisiacal, getting and giving what we are. He melts me into pudding every time he says, "I always knew, you know. I knew forever would be you." He makes me feel like he made it happen.

We didn’t really fall in love, instead we just burst into it. When we became intimate, I noticed Ollie had been given compensatory leave, and just kept a post on the bureau.

Later, Starsky secretly promoted him to Officer of support services at Metro, always just an arm’s length away on the file cabinet. Everyone puts up with our quarky junk that hangs around, so Ollie just blends into the menagerie. But it’s important to Starsky to have him there, especially when we’re in the thick of a case that involves gore on the innocent. For some reason, I never had the chance to ask him why his name is Ollie.

Even regular occasions with children gets Starsky’s adulation. When Edith Dobey invited us to a party for their little daughter, off we went shopping, for hours.

It drove me bananas. "Why are we taking so long picking out this teddy?"

"Because this one is extra extra special."

"What for?"

"Because it’s for a Rosie."

So that enlightened me. Because there was indeed another Rosie, the first Rosie. An Aunt Rosie, as beautiful as an Irish summer.

It was Starsky who told me how he had acted like a brat, when he arrived to live with his relatives here.

Aunt Rosie opened her door and hugged him like a lost pooch. She gave her new David a bear when he arrived from New York as a welcome present. I suspect it was to signify comfort, security, to have some --friend-- of his own. But Starsky was a tough by then, the streets had gotten to him.

"A teddy? What am I gonna do with a stuffed bear? He’s staring at me! I’m not soft, I ain’t no girl."

But Aunt Rosie insisted, "Someday you’re gonna like him staring at you…"

"It’s an it, not a him."

She started again. "Someday you’re going to like it staring at you. When you’re ready to be a man, you’ll face the loss of your father."

"I already did. I don’t care. Ain’t nothing gonna bring him back or break me down. Nothing stupid like a mushy doll."

"That’s boy talk. You’ll find out men do more than talk. They allow themselves to cry."

"I don’t believe that. All that toy is good for is to punch in the face."

With that, Aunt Rosie took the bear away. The next day Uncle Al bought David a set of weights with barbells. He also put up a punching bag, and boxing gloves. And Aunt Rosie tied the bear to the bag.

It was all David needed for incentive. He beat that face to pulp for weeks on end. He was determined, but so was the old Irish girl. When the eyes fell off, Aunt Rosie sewed more back on.

"Maybe you shouldn’t," Al wondered. "It’ll make him mean."

"No," Rosie replied, "it’ll make him think. Someday, he’ll see himself in a pair of eyes, and really see."

Of course, she had no idea those eyes would be slanted, and that he’d be told they were evil, that the Army would train him to kill on sight, no matter the gender or age. Starsky had said they were told, that all they were to us are, "Victor Charlies. Gooks." After a year in the field, he didn’t recognize his own features when he saw it in a rusty reflection.

One long evening, he decided to tell me about that awful day his platoon had to go clean up and bury a whole village’s dead. It wasn’t his group that did the killing, but it couldn’t have made it feel any better. "That’s when I saw with my own eyes, Hutch. My real inside eyes, for the first time since my Dad died, since I left New York. I fell to my knees when I found it. I saw Aunt Rosie’s bear, just like the one I had beat to a pulp, with the crooked sewn back pupils, laying on the filthy ground, muddy and soaked in blood. And a little hand, half torn off, clutching it, was met by the most beautiful, precious porcelian face I will ever see in my life, with closed, slanted eyes, a girl not five years old, sleeping in death. My commander had two of my buddies drag me away, I wasn’t gonna be able to dig a hole and put dirt over that."

He was quiet for a while. "I had nightmares for three days. They had me peeling potatoes to get my mind off it. I asked the Company shrink to let me go back, so I went with the Sargent to the burial site, I wanted to steady myself. I didn’t need to see anything, just be there, for a minute, because I knew I was a new person. A year later, when my duty was about over, I wrote to Aunt Rosie and asked her when she picked me up, to bring me a new bear. When I came home, I threw my head on her lap and cried like a baby. She told me I’d left the house an angry lad, but I brought her home a fine young man."

The next time we visited after Starsky told me this story, I kept looking for that fluffy animal, and wouldn’t you know, Al said it always sat in Rosie’s day chair, right where they had had their talk upon his homecoming. So I went to their room, and found it sitting in the light of the afternoon, glowing from the shadow of the dust particles distributed by the Venetian blinds. I can’t even describe how flabbergasted I was. I stood and stared with my mouth open.

Rosie had entered the room to get a sweater. She approached me. "He told you, Ken?"

"Not everything, apparently."

Rosie rose the edges of her lips endearingly. "You didn’t know what he looked like."

Slowly, I shook my head no. "He’s amber, with turquoise eyes. With a gold bow."

"Yes, his coming home safe meant so much to us. He was our precious commodity."

I turned to see her radiance. I loved her for what she had done for Starsky, how she saved him and made him whole. Loved her so much.

"He named him, you know."

I closed my eyes. I was trembling against my will, seeing that little girl in Vietnam in my mind, the one I never really saw, that somehow I knew whose visage he picked out when he went to the fairs, the toy stores, and at Terry’s school. Had he given her a name?

"I would think the bear’s name would be Rosie," I offered. She put her wise and gentle hand on my back, trying to steady me.

"His name is Blondie."

I shook to my core. I was so grateful there’d never be a cure for providence, and the mercy my soul had been chosen to receive. For having been given his name, and made his beau.

Somehow Rosie receded. David Starsky walked in at that moment, and met me frozen in place. His sheepish grin, his manly stance; a child had flourished, a man had come to maturation. I wanted to engulf them both, in my sentimental, gifted partner. I succumbed and squeezed him until he was out of oxygen, and then I filled his mouth with the life in my lungs. With Love’s breath, our air was brimful with bliss.

He told me on the way home, the things I ached to know.

"It floored me, Starsk. The turquoise eyes."

"Those were the first eyes that really stared at me, the first ones I really saw when I got back…"

"But the little girl in the village…" I rubbed my lids, already painfully wet.

"I said I saw my inside eyes, Babe. Hers were closed." He beamed a smile at me. "But when I did get a chance to look at a real person, yours just did me in." He had made us happen, right from the beginning, calling me Blondie since the Academy.

"And Ollie? You named him, not Terry?"

"Of course I named him. I already had a Blondie."

I whispered it out. "So Ollie was also me?" Oh, God. "You mean she…"

"Terry knew. At the time, I wanted your happiness, your inner boy to always be with me and Terry." Even in their bed.

I was awed by the paradoxes. I took his hand that hung between the seats in the car. "That night, after the presents, when I offered to hold you…"

"…Little did you know you were offering me the whole package, both pieces of yourself. But you were the only adult in the room, Hutch, I was imploding then… I couldn’t have made it without you."

"No wonder you were never jealous she gave Ollie to me…"

"Why would I be? You were right there." That smile, like Aunt Rosie’s. "And here you are."

We exchanged a glance. And I was floating, knowing I had a lifetime of this to go.

Terry’s note suddenly flooded in. "She wanted us together, Ollie and Dave, not just Starsky and Hutch."

"Yep." Joy dripped out of me. "And Ollie fits you when you’re silly, from where I Stan."

FIN

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