Work Text:
Sweet Music Man 1
By TLR
Plot: Hutch’s teenage dream of music collides with betrayal, leaving scars that follow him into Bay City.
Some dialogue and scenes taken directly from episodes.
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Part 1.
1976.
The silence told him first.
She lay still on the floor, blond hair spilling over the carpet, the delicate shape of her face beautiful even in death but empty. He tried to revive her but it was too late.
Her phone rang, and it was her killer to taunt, naming where and when. Starsky called a coroner's team and a crime lab, then came Hutch's voice behind him.
“What's goin' on?”
When no answer came, Hutch slowly moved across the room, looking, trying to see but not wanting to see.
Starsky's voice was quiet. “She's dead, Hutch.”
Hutch knelt down as if in a dream, lightly touching, her name a bare whisper on his lips.
“Gillian.”
Starsky softly tried to explain, bit by bit, scarcely believing it himself, numb for Hutch's sake.
Hutch didn't understand. How could she have any connection to Alan Grossman? It couldn't be true, it couldn't be. She couldn't be a hooker, a prostitute?
“Look around you. What do you think bought this place?”
Starsky had to say it. Hutch had to hear it this way to believe it, so he could clear it and keep moving.
Hutch's face broke with pain as his fist punched Starsky to the floor, his rage blind to the enduring love of his best friend.
Starsky had to be lying, he never did like her, he never did understand her, at least that's what he told himself.
It wasn't true, but Starsky's words were. He saw her at the massage parlor, in the back room.
Hutch pulled him to his feet, still hurting, still angry. Starsky would take a thousand more punches if it eased Hutch's pain.
“How many years we known each other, huh? You're the best friend I got in the whole world. You think I like sayin' things like this to you?”
Hutch broke. He bent. He collapsed into Starsky's arms in surrender to truth and to pain.
Starsky held him dearly, protecting, saving, taking his pain. This was more than Gillian. This was an old pain that Starsky sensed but had never spoken, because he was waiting for Hutch. This hug was for more than Gillian. It was for the secret Hutch.
“It's gonna be okay. Get it out, buddy. We got some work to do.”
::
Part 2
“What'd we get you on last time, Artie?” Starsky asked in Jimmy Shannon's room. “Contributing to the delinquency of a minor?”
“Fagin, fagela,” Hutch added hotly. “What's the difference? You're vermin.”
The vicious way Hutch looked at Artie... Starsky saw a less than composed partner with perspiration on his face, and knew it was more than playing bad cop. “I can't take you out anymore, Hutch. You keep insulting my friends.” Starsky wouldn't say yet, it wasn't Hutch's time.
Hutch knew more than Artie's record, and could feel it, but he didn't know why or how he knew it. He couldn't yet connect the dots because he'd buried the dots. He was an iceberg, with most of himself beneath the surface and only the tip of himself showing.
Hutch had Artie Solkin's number from the beginning, but it took one of Artie's victims to make the connections within himself.
When Starsky opened the door to Tommy's room and saw Hutch sitting there with that look on his face, the posture of his body, he finally knew from deep intuition and love, but it wasn't his to tell.
Once Artie was taken to the police station to be booked, and Tommy taken to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation and possible treatment, it was just Starsky sitting with Hutch in the Torino in the dark near the park, a place where many close conversations were had.
“Hey,” Starsky said quietly as Hutch bit down thoughtfully on a thumbnail. “Tommy... what is it, Hutch? What was it about him?”
Starsky knew, but Hutch needed to say it.
Hutch looked out into the darkness for now, suppressed feelings, thoughts, and memories rising within.
An eloquent speaker on other days, Hutch now spoke with the uncertainty and clumsiness of a two-year-old. “Starsk, I... I'm Tommy. Tommy's me. Or... I could have been if... ” His eyes closed. “I know what Artie's boys went through.”
Hutch's normally steady hand was now picking nervously at a thread on the bandage of his other hand.
Starsky listened, and listened well, and when Hutch was finished talking, and shedding tears, he gripped Hutch's forearm in compassion. Hutch had told him about his adolescent cross-country hitching to California before, but hadn't told him everything, and Starsky realized that was probably because he hadn't faced it.
“There were men, Starsk. They gave me money. Beds, promises, attention. If I just... stayed with them.”
Starsky’s heart stilled, eyes staying on his friend.
“I let them,” Hutch said looking down. “Sometimes I said no. Sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes they didn’t listen.” He forced a sad, bitter smile. “And I don’t even know why I let them. I wasn’t attracted to them. I’m not… I’m not gay. So why did I?” He broke off, breath hitching, and his voice cracked. “What does that make me, Starsk? I don't know. I didn’t want it, but I didn’t always stop it. I think... part of me needed it. Closeness, assurances that everything would be all right. I needed someone and I didn't care who it was.” He partially covered his eyes with his fingers. “Oh God.”
Starsky's voice was a near whisper too. “You were a kid, Hutch. Hungry, scared, alone. They were adults, and they took advantage. That wasn't your fault, and isn't your fault now.”
“But what if—”
“No. No what ifs. You were a victim. That doesn’t make you weak or less of a man, and it sure as hell doesn’t mean you’re gay just ‘cause some sickos decided to use you.”
Now Hutch looked at him, waiting for the catch, the judgment.
Starsky's eyes were true. “And even if you were gay, so? That’s your road, your choice. Doesn’t change who you are, or us. I don’t care what you label yourself, you’re my partner. My best friend. And that’s forever.”
Something crumbled between them then, there in the front seat, and Starsky pulled him so close their bodies one.
“I’ll always be here, Hutch. No matter what happened then, or happens now. You hear me?”
Hutch nodded into his shoulder, his burden beginning to lift.
::
Prologue.
“I'm sorry, Dad, but I don't want the life of a real estate man. I want music, and songs, and playing guitar.”
Seventeen, and already out the door. Kicked out really.
The argument with his father had ended with the sharp crack of Richard Hutchinson’s hand on his cheek, a shame he would never forget--final, unbending--and the softer sound of Dorothy’s ineffectual plea drowned out in the wake of his voice.
“Ungrateful son! Don't darken my doorway again!”
Hutch carried his guitar in its case and one small duffel into the Minnesota night, cold air stinging his cheeks, not knowing where to walk but knowing he couldn’t stay.
For a while, he hitchhiked. Many small towns ran together like watercolor paintings: Gas stations glowing against the snow, cafés that served black coffee for a few cents, bars that didn't ask his age and let him play two folk songs in exchange for a cot in a back room. He scribbled lines in a notebook about stars, sky, romance, loss, and yearning. None of it brought him closer to anything he could call home.
One night the cold was too much. He huddled in a doorway, fingers stiff, stomach empty, trying to pretend he didn't hear his teeth chattering--a sound he wasn't used to because he'd had all the comforts at home.
That’s when the sleek Lincoln slowed and stopped.
The man inside wore a suit and an expensive smile. “Need a ride, son?”
Hutch’s breath clouded in the air as he nodded. No hesitation because he trusted too much. The warmth of the car heater was a sanctuary.
The man offered him food, then a bed for the night. Hutch, too young to understand and too desperate to care, accepted.
::
The guest room was lavish with heavy drapes, thick blankets, a lamp that glowed warm gold instead of harsh white. Hutch lay awake staring at the ceiling, believing kindness still existed in men like him.
But later the man entered and sat on the edge of his bed, speaking kindly about friendship, opportunity, a family of sorts, promises of contacts in the music industry. Hutch listened with sleepy eyes and an open heart. When the man slipped folded bills on the nightstand, Hutch was grateful, but when the man began touching, he said no, and when he turned to leave the bed, the man pulled him back and made him.
::
Hutch left as soon as the man went to his room, clutching the money he hadn’t wanted but needed to survive, guitar banging against his back as he walked. Each step felt heavier, shame gathering inside his soul like heat through his bloodstream.
::
Las Vegas brought neon, noise, and more heads turned toward the beautiful young man. Some smiling, some with hands that reached too close, but propositions too promising to resist.
He could play what they wanted him to be. He could pretend. It didn't mean anything. They wanted something, and so did he.
“It's what you do to get anywhere,” more than one said.
They paid to spend time. At first it was okay, and then it wasn't, then he wanted to get as far away from it as he could, but on the way out, he was taken again, and refusals didn't work.
He threw his old songs away, the ones that used to be him, full of hope and innocence before life changed him. The songs in him now, he couldn’t bear to think about, let alone sing.
Finally, exhausted, used, and hollow, he stuffed the guitar into a trash bin down an alley and turned his thumb west.
::
It was his uncle Ray who opened the door in California, who smelled of earthy pipe tobacco and coffee, who didn’t ask questions at first. Young Hutch stumbled into his arms and broke apart like glass finally hitting the floor.
Ray held him, steady as a tree, while Hutch wept against his shoulder.
“It'll be all right,” Ray said. “You're home.”
But Hutch knew the truth. He was home, but he wasn't himself. What he was, was survival, and carried a survivor's secret in his heart. Ray’s arms held, but could not heal. The healing would take a few years, and a friend who would not let go.
::
1968.
Bay City Police Academy.
There was a graduation party for the cadets in the cafeteria. Music, dancing, and a lot of laughing and camaraderie. One of the cadets who toyed with the guitar and liked to sing couldn't make it that night, so the live music part of the party was scratched, until one of the instructors took the microphone in his hand on the stage and asked, “Does anyone here sing or play the guitar?”
The cadets looked around at one another, shrugging and complaining that there would be no live music tonight as promised.
Then a tipsy Ken Hutchinson raised a hand and said, “I'll do it.”
Someone found a guitar and held it out to him.
Hutch's friend and fellow cadet David Starsky gaped at him. “What? Now I know you're drunk.”
Hutch smiled and took the stage and performed a beautiful rendition of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” which left the crowd of cadets too stunned to applaud, until finally Starsky did.
When the party was over, Starsky asked him as they were walking out, “Why didn't you tell me you have a voice like an angel and can play the guitar?”
Hutch offered a quiet shrug. “What's there to tell?”
It was that night on their way back to the academy dorm that Starsky bought Hutch a guitar at an all-night pawn shop and gave it to him.
--the end--