Title: Pants, Badge, Gun, and Dignity
Author: hardboiledbaby
Fandom: Starsky and Hutch
Characters: Starsky, Hutch
Rating: PG-13
Length: 617 words
Content notes: no warnings
Author notes: A missing scene from the ep A Coffin For Starsky.
Summary: Starsky has 24 hours to live. Now one of those hours is gone.

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I opened my eyes, then shut them and winced. It was bright, too bright.

Terrific. I must've overslept. Late again—Hutch was going to kill me.

The worst part of it was, I hadn't even enjoyed the extra snooze time. It certainly didn't seem to have done me any good: I'd had an awful nightmare and I felt like crap, achy and light-headed. My arm itched, my mouth was dry, and—

I sat up fast and looked down at my arm, at the little red puncture in my skin.

Fuck.

So. Not a nightmare, then.

Suddenly, I realized that the light-headedness was gone, driven away by the pounding that had taken over my brain. And it wasn't only my head. My heart was racing too, hammering so hard I could actually hear it. Was this the poison, already working? Or just me being scared shitless?

I decided I didn't like either of those two possibilities. I swallowed and tried to slow down my breathing, which I just noticed was also way too fast.

"Starsky."

I looked up. Hutch was standing a few feet away, clutching a pair of my blue jeans in his hands. I hadn't heard him come into the room, either because my heartbeats were still drowning out every other sound, or because he'd been standing there all along.

"I fell asleep?" I asked stupidly. After Hutch and I left the hospital, we'd come back here to my place so I could get dressed and pick up the Torino. I was still feeling pretty zonked out from whatever I'd been doped up with. Last thing I remember, I'd sat down on the bed....

"By the time I got your pants and a shirt out of the closet, you were out like a light. I-I figured you needed to rest for a few minutes."

"How long?"

"About an hour."

An hour. A whole fucking hour. I had maybe less than 24 of them left, and I'd just lost one in La-La Land. An hour that I was never gonna get back.

"Ah, damn it, Hutch."

I wanted to get mad, really mad at him: for not waking me up, for wasting time when we should have been out there doing something, for not being there when I was poisoned, for—

"I'm sorry, Starsk."

He really was, too. Sorry for all those things and more, for everything bad that had happened to me, ever. Hutch's face was strained and his shoulders were bowed with the weight of it, and I closed my eyes. God help me, I didn't want to see him like that, and know it was me that put that burden on him. I shook my head.

I needed to focus, get my head in the game. Getting angry and taking it out on Hutch was wrong, and would only make a bad situation worse. We were in this together, "me and thee" all the way. I took a deep breath, and then another, slowly. My pulse was slowing down, too.

After a while, I opened my eyes and nodded. Hutch nodded back and held out my clothes. He was still worried, but he had his badass cop face on now. That made me feel a little better. If we find the bastard that did this to me, Hutch was going to make him so fucking sorry he had ever been born.

When, I mean. When we find him.

I got dressed and stood up. Hutch put his hand on my shoulder, and I leaned on him for a second. Then I picked up my weapon, my badge, and my keys.

"Okay, partner. Time to do what we do best. Let's go hit the streets."