A/N: promptfic: ache, warm
Coming home from Vietnam...
Luke Duke climbed carefully down the bus steps, balancing his heavy duffle bag over the shoulder opposite from the thigh that ached with each step. His hand briefly pressed over the mostly-healed bullet wound as he moved away from the curb, consciously regulating his breathing for a few seconds, before daring to look up and around for the people he knew, trusted from the bottom of his weary country boy's heart, would have come to meet him.
He was home at last. Free of military service, free of regimented life. Free of the death and destruction and despair that had pervaded entirely too many of the last years, an especially painful thing for a boy raised in Hazzard County. He still didn't feel entirely free inside - not yet. It would take time. But the relief when he finally stepped onto old, cracked concrete, looked around the town square he'd known by heart since early childhood, and took a deep breath of familiar air was overwhelming.
Luke had been in a jungle country for entirely too long to really appreciate heat anymore; especially this sticky-Southern-summer kind. But when he caught his cousin Daisy's smile, heard Jesse holler his name, and saw Bo's broad grin, he thought he'd never seen anything more welcomingly warm.