I've been super frustrated with writer's block on an unfinished S&H story and I needed something interesting to do in the meanwhile. This idea came to me while reading someone else's fanfic and I decided to experiment a little with all dialogue vs. no dialogue. As always, I own nothing.

It was one of those days. Bright sun, cool breeze, no work, and the city had settled into a kind of calm that promised him, at the very least, one day of undisturbed relaxation.

He'd begun the day with his partner, but Starsky had made plans with a lady friend, and to see the spark in his eyes, the plans would run through until the following morning. Hutch's lady was out of town, but he was content with the solitude it provided him. He finished a few projects in the house, but couldn't avoid the beauty that the day promised.

Eventually he found himself climbing into his jogging rig and hitting the pavement. Feeling adventurous, Hutch had diverted from his normal route and headed across town for a park that he normally only visited when hunting for known predators.

They only came out at dusk, though, being the type that preferred not to announce their business. Hutch decided that he could reasonably enjoy his run without feeling the need to act in any official capacity. The park was full of low-income families enjoying the luxury of the weather. Hutch smiled softly watching Hispanic mothers sit on benches near the rusting play equipment, chatting while they watched their children play.

A very young mother, still waiting to meet her child, sat under a tree, one hand on her belly, the other propping up a worn paperback. The teenage father sat beside her, picking at a guitar. Both had flowers in their hair.

Hutch shook his head, thinking about the upcoming generation, in development before his very eyes. What would the eighties look like? He wondered. The nineties? The turn of the century? Would he and Starsky even live that long?

Determined to do everything in his power to hold up his end of that particular bargain, Hutch pushed a little harder, leaving the park and heading for the giant drainage canals that separated one side of town from the other. The bridge he chose had plenty of room for pedestrians and vehicles. The pedestrian portion of the bridge was even separated from the roadway with a low concrete barrier.

When the semi hit the roadway, moving at three times the posted speed limit, the thought occurred to Hutch that the driver was deliberately too close to his side of the bridge. His eyes went to the face of the driver, trying to determine if he could be seen, if the driver was in distress, if he should be running to, or away from the semi.

He chose the latter but he chose it too late. The semi was moving too fast and veering too sharply toward the side of the bridge. Just as the front tires jumped the barrier, Hutch leapt onto the metal pipe that ran the length of the bridge wall. Miraculously he kept his footing and managed to put a few feet between himself and the truck before something struck his head.

It might have been a piece of flying concrete, or a part of the front of the truck. His reaction to the pain it caused was enough to throw Hutch off balance and his foot slipped. His left knee came down with bone-cracking force against the pipe, then he was falling. His right hand went out, caught the edge of the bridge wall and held.

Hutch fought the agony suddenly bursting from his left knee and flung his other hand up, forcing his shoulders and biceps into motion.

Over the top edge of his handhold he saw the grill of the truck coming at him, and had to make a decision.

Everyone saw the truck hit the pedestrian barrier. Everyone saw the tires jump the concrete balustrade and the jogger disappearing over the edge of the bridge.

Several people claimed to have seen the body of the jogger splashing into the three feet of water that remained after the last big rain storm.

No one could say who he was. None of them recognized him, and most of their descriptions disagreed with each other on one or two minor details. The cops who arrived to help clean up the mess did a cursory search of the canal under the bridge and found nothing.

A brief search in a row boat turned up no body.

The following morning, when Starsky was awakened by a phone call asking him to report to the scene of a major drug bust, he was told about the unfortunate jogger that had been run off the road by the DUI driver/dealer.

He assisted with the remainder of the neighborhood canvas, finding no one that recognized the man, and no missing persons that matched the conflicting descriptions. In between attempts at doing his job he was fending off increasingly angry calls from Dobey, wanting to know why Hutch wasn't responding to his ringing phone.

Once he was able, Starsky broke free of the crime scene and visited Hutch's apartment. It was 3pm that afternoon before he walked into Hutch's home, found his gun and badge, his leather jacket, his car keys and wallet. All the things that Hutch would have taken with him if he'd gone out of town.

None of the things that Hutch would have taken...if he'd gone out for a jog.

Starsky told himself not to panic, calmly searching with shaking hands through his partner's drawers until he came up minus the gray jogging suit and brown tennis shoes he knew Hutch to prefer.

When he left Hutch's place everything was the same, except for the badge. The weight of it now burned a hole in Starsky's pants pocket.

It took him half-an-hour to convince Dobey of his suspicions and the search for the unknown jogger began anew.

There was a second canvas, two times as big. This began at Hutch's apartment and crossed town, weaving through a park and ending at the canal. Starsky wore a crumpled picture of his partner to tissue paper, folding and unfolding it. Passing it in and out of grease, dirt and sweat covered hands.

He lost more ready cash in one late afternoon than he ever had in Vegas and was losing so badly, had he been in a casino, it would have been shut down by the gaming commission.

At midnight Starsky was walking the length of the canal, a dying flashlight in hand, Huggy Bear somewhere on the opposite side of the wide, concrete valley doing the same. The rest of the cops had been assigned to other duties. Dobey had been trying to call his man in, trying to redirect him away from what most had considered a hopeless cause, at least for a few hours.

He hadn't been trying very hard. Dobey knew better. He knew Starsky wouldn't sleep until Hutch was found, one way or another. Once he was off duty, once he had gone home and hugged his children and kissed his wife, he told them what the day had brought.

His family stood in a circle and prayed, muttering hopeful amen's seconds before Dobey walked back out the door. He found Huggy and Starsky a mile from the closed down bridge and gave Starsky one of the steaming cups of black coffee he'd bought, before driving around the canal and giving the other to Huggy.

To both men he declared that he was going to follow the canal until it terminated in a barrier that Hutch's…that Hutch couldn't simply slip through. Then he was going to meet them in the middle.

It was Huggy that spotted the shoe. Mud coated, the shoe laces tangled in a net bag, the brown tennis shoe should have been impossible to see with only a flashlight beam, but Huggy saw it. It had sent a flash of sickness through his stomach that nearly cost him the burned coffee he'd downed, and he was stumbling down the steep incline screaming for Starsky's attention.

The water level had gone down about a foot, making it possible to ford the canal without risk of being swept away. Starsky hadn't hesitated, splashing through the high, junk-clogged water and snatching the shoe out of Huggy's grip.

It was Hutch's. There was no question. Starsky and Huggy poured over the area, inching through the water and the side tunnels, soaked to the bone before Starsky determined that Hutch wasn't there.

Huggy watched the man, feeling the last bit of his own hope drain away with the waning effects of the coffee. He would mourn, but he knew he could accept Hutch's death. The greater regret was that Starsky wouldn't. For a long moment Huggy was thrust into the future, watching Starsky age before his time, forced into a world without his other half.

Huggy considered himself too self-centered a man to allow so depressing a future and took a deep breath through his nose, nodding to himself with determination. They would find Hutch...one way or another, he decided. The search continued.

By the time the sun rose they'd covered the length of the canal twice. Both Huggy and Starsky were quaking with cold in the cool mist of the morning and Dobey, trying not to curl his lip at the smell wafting through the heat in his car, was ready to force both men into their beds.

They'd been casually ignoring the radio while the two chilled men sucked down hot coffee. All of them froze when the call for an ambulance came in. The address was within two blocks, the subject an unidentified white male.

There was no other description but all three men reacted the same. Dobey raced his sedan through the streets, the bubble flashing over the driver's side door, Starsky and Huggy clinging to anything they could hang onto in the back seat.

The homeless men that had found the John Doe scattered away from the body the moment they saw the car with the flashing light careen around the corner. Starsky was out the door, wet sneakers slipping on the pavement, even before Dobey put the car in park.

Hutch had thrown up on himself and reeked of the vomit and the refuse he'd had a swim in. His left knee was swollen to twice its size and his ankle was blue under the cuff of the pant leg. There was a scabbed over wound on his right brow and someone had strapped his right arm to his chest with a fraying, nylon belt.

His eyes were sunken, the eyelids and the flesh surrounding it glossy and swollen. His lips were blue. He was breathing in shallow gasps that rattled dangerously. Starsky pulled his partner into his arms, pressed him hard against his chest and held him there until the ambulance came.

He didn't notice the blanket around his shoulders until Hutch had disappeared into a treatment room at the hospital. Like waking from a nightmare Starsky blinked and looked around the deserted, sun-yellow hallway, becoming slowly aware:

Of the silence he'd been surrounded by.

Of the discomfort of muck covered clothing that had dried against his skin.

Of the grate in the back of his throat signalling a cold coming on.

Of the heat radiating from his face, the result of two days in the sun, unprotected.

Of the time that had passed without his being awake to notice it.

Of the gap in his consciousness, caused by Hutch's absence.

Starsky got to his feet and felt a hundred pains cry out. He walked stiffly down the hall to the doors of the room Hutch had been wheeled into, he didn't know how long ago. He stared at the barrier for a few minutes before he decided that Hutch needed him, more than he needed him to wait in the hall.

Starsky reached out a blanket covered hand and pushed through the door. He vaguely heard a solid, mechanical tone changing to a steady beep beep beep before he registered the scene. Nurses pumping air, a doctor pumping his chest, an orderly pumping adrenaline and antibiotics through an IV. There was a tube in Hutch's bare chest, pumping light pink fluid out.

All of that had paused temporarily as the beep beep beep continued to ring through the empty air. Then, one by one, each of the medical staff turned to stare at the man still standing half-in, half-out of the room.

The doctor in charge immediately recognized the curly-headed man and his stunned silence shifted. Suddenly he understood how a body, clinically dead with little prognosis for recovery, could so improbably regain a steady sinus rhythm.

A second later that same, doomed man began to breathe on his own and the doctor smiled softly, before he urged his nurse to take care of the worn police detective standing in the doorway.

It took several hours for the two to be reunited, but when they were, both slept soundly for a solid twenty-four hours.

Once awake, Starsky was at Hutch's side constantly and none could move him, even if they wanted to.

Hutch's voice crackled when he woke, his vocal cords strained by the sickness caused by swallowing, trying to breathe and then regurgitating canal water. Starsky heard the sound and stood, ready with a cup of ice chips in one hand, his other resting on Hutch's bare arm.

Blue eyes opened and Starsky smiled.

"Hey Hutch."

"H-"

"Want some ice?"

"Ye-"

"There ya go...only ice for now. Doc says your stomach took a beating after all that run-off you tried to drink. That's taking the natural diet a little far, buddy."

"H-hilariou-"

"Funnier than you. You've been a real drag lately. Left me with nobody to talk to."

"Yvo-Yv-"

"She uh...she didn't much like me ignoring her for two days, or coming back to her soaked in canal water. Go ahead and laugh, Chuckles. Huggy was with me that whole time. He says you owe him a hundred bucks for the shoes he ruined."

"Hug-?"

"Huggy, Dobey, most of the cops in town, every prostitute you've flashed your eyes at, every snitch we've been a little too nice to. Whole city was lookin' for ya."

"Mor-"

"More ice? Here ya go."

"L-look….crap."

"Heh. Where'd I put that mirror? You're laughing. You've got a new addition, pal. Most people won't notice it in that blonde hair of yours but you're sportin' a little gray."

"Wha?"

"Oh yeah, aging before your time. I'm gonna buy the wheel chair we're going to wheel you out of here in...wanna be prepared for the future."

"Over my dea-"

"Yeah…...you tried that too. Doc looked like he'd seen a ghost, or an angel, when you came back."

"Chest….hurts?"

"That's one of the reasons why, anyway. More ice?"

"Yeah."

"You know that doc's gonna give me a hard time if I keep you up any longer but I gotta ask you somethin'."

"What?"

"Why in hell would you go for a jog on that side of town?"

Hutch reached out a hand and pulled his partner's palm in, placing it against the center of his chest and holding it there. He closed his eyes, content with that pressure near his heart and muttered, "S'nice day, Starsk."

As his partner fell asleep Starsky set the cup of melting ice back on the bedside table and felt the strength of his brother's heart beat through the thin hospital gown.

"Today's a better one, partner." Starsky said.