"Night is the blotting paper for many sorrows." - unknown

Black

The sky should have been black the day he died, clouds hanging thickly against a brooding sky.

Anything would have been better than the brilliant sunshine streaming from a crystal blue sky, the kind of day he would have been nagging Starsky to take a fishing trip up to the lake.

The kind of day they would have spent laughing, and joking, talking about girls and spinning tall tales.

It shouldn't have been the day that Starsky didn't show up for work, and when he got the call at lunch he knew, felt like a cold hand closing over his heart that Starsky was gone, slipped beyond his reach without a goodbye.

He drove slowly, as if to put off the inevitable, climbed out of the car like an eighty year old man and walked down the bank toward the river.

They'd dragged his partner out of the water, laid him on the bank, face tilted upward as if his frozen gaze could see the sky. There wasn't much blood, only a little around the bullet hole in his chest, straight through the heart and exiting the other side.

He couldn't touch him at first, couldn't make his fingers knuckle the cold skin, brush the tangled and sodden curls.

Out of respect the others moved back, allowing him to lift the limp body into his arms and carry him the endlessly long walk to the silent and waiting ambulance.

It should have been raining as he staggered under the weight of his burden, water sheeting out of the sky and soaking him, anything to cover the moisture that ran down his cheeks.

It took all his strength to pry his own fingers from the form cradled against him, to relinquish his best friend to the paramedics.

Their faces should have been hopeful not set in sorrow and sympathy. They should have started IVs, a hundred machines, and a wailing siren.

Instead they lifted a white sheet over his partner's face, leaving him with that final moment stamped into his mind like a brand. They told him quietly that he could go home, could make the arrangements later.

He went, without even responding.

He didn't take off his clothes when he got home, only went straight to the chair shoved against a wall and stared into empty space, as if an answer was written there, listening to the silence as if someone could tell him why he was alive and his partner was dead, why whoever had killed him was living and breathing while Starsky was lying lifeless and cold.

Later, he should have stood up at the funeral, should have told everyone what sort of man David Starsky was, should have found words to explain how empty the world was without him.

But he couldn't manage to speak.

There should have been others at the funeral, family, girlfriends, friends. Someone besides the Dobeys and Hutch.

It should have been Starsky's shoulder he touched instead of the wood of a coffin. It should have been Starsky at the wheel of the striped car instead of the man who'd been his partner, his best friend. Instead of the man who drove out of the cemetery like he didn't care whether someone hit and killed him on the way.

He drove home like he always did. But he didn't reach for his guitar, for a book, or for the telephone. He poured himself a drink, and then another, the liquid burning it's way down his throat.

Somehow it turns dark, and without changing he falls into bed, the alcohol dulling the pain enough to let him sleep, to make him dream.

In the morning he goes to work, sits down at their..at his...desk and starts filling out forms. Captain Dobey tries to send him home twice but he doesn't respond, and eventually the older man leaves him alone.

Each time the door opens he looks up, and once he even reaches for the telephone, dialing half a number before it all comes crashing back.

There should have been someone to come in the door, to tell him that's it only a cruel joke, only a bad dream, and it's over.

There should have been someone to tell him he isn't really alone, that he won't get a new partner, that everything will be okay.

He would have sold his soul even to hear that lie, to believe it for one minute.

There should have been.

But there never is.