The Reunion Movies. I did write vignettes for them, but much like the movies didn't fit with the rest of the series, these vignettes are not as fun or filled with promise as the others have been.

It's a struggle to reconcile the boys going off to separate lives with the behavior they exhibited in the series. They were clearly close and did just about everything together. And as much as probation theoretically held them together and stuck them in Hazzard, clearly they could get out whenever they wanted to. If they wanted to be somewhere else or away from each other, they would have figured out a way to do it. So them going in different directions like that almost feels like they ran away from each other.

This first one is from Dukes of Hazzard: Reunion! and is pretty safe to read. The second one, in chapter two, never really resolves itself. And it's as sad as the reunion movies felt to me, kind of like putting a nail into the coffin of what used to be plain old fun. There's hope for the boys, but it's now a long and hard road instead of the fun one they used to ride down until a normal car could go no more, then jump over whatever obstacle was at the end.

EDIT: I went back some months later and followed this story line out. Warning, this is slash, its incest, it gets graphic. Read it only if all of those things are okay with you.

Come Back

It was hard to believe looking at the house now, all yellow trimmed with white, clean and snug on the property that was more lawn than a farmyard now, how only ten years ago, they'd had nothing. Everything was smaller – somehow Hazzard had cramped up into plots instead of farms – and tidier, with only the smell of ripening gooseberries and the weakening old arms of their uncle to make it home. The place was as common and vanilla as any housing development he'd seen in the towns ringing Atlanta, looked boring but far more prosperous than it had been ten years ago.

Or twelve, more like it. At least he knew for sure that their probation had ended that long ago. Why the whole town waited to spruce up until him and Luke were actually free to leave, he couldn't say. He knew the farm'd been fixed up thanks to the money they'd been sending home ever since they went off and got themselves paying jobs. Now they had everything they could want, their own space, exciting careers, and security for their uncle in his old age, living here in the cottage that was once a farmhouse.

Back then they had nothing, poor as church mice, Rosco used to so helpfully remind them. Ain't making two hundred dollars in a year, as old Ace Parker had once informed them. They'd had nothing, not even hope for the future. Just time stretching out in front of them like it was endless, wide open countryside with the occasional crisscrossing dirt road. Just that, and each other.

What was it Luke said the last time some lady tried to take over the county and tear it up for her own purposes? Something about how the years they spent in this house with Jesse bringing them up were likely to be the best of their lives.

Old Luke over there was doing a fine imitation of a man who would never have said such a thing. Half amused, half annoyed and highly put-upon to be in Hazzard at all. Everything was absurd to him; then again it always had been. The difference now was that Bo could see it, too – Hazzard was doing the same laps it ever had, not getting any faster or better at them. Prettier, but no smarter.

"Luke," and it was incongruous, not to mention impossible, be he had to ask anyway. "Do you really got to go?" Tomorrow, which had seemed like a long time ago back when Luke got off that ridiculous fire engine on Sunday.

"Don't you?" was all the answer he got, nothing useful about it. Just the last drops of beer swirling around in a tin can, waiting to get sipped down; Luke was making up his mind to drink them, or waiting for Bo to finish his, first. "Jesse don't need us here no more," was the afterthought of an answer, can tipped, fizz trickling down Luke's throat to the rhythm of that same bobbing adam's apple he's watched since Luke turned fourteen. It's about the only indicator of Luke's emotions, a rise and fall of that one little lump in lieu of the words, I think we're in trouble, Bo.

"Jesse don't need us here no more," Bo agreed. In fact, the new balance of all of their lives relied on Bo and Luke earning salaries and sending them home so Jesse wouldn't have to farm anymore, and Daisy could afford graduate school.

It's better for everyone, might have been Luke's next words. The kind of thing that made the same sort of sense that Luke always did. Sitting on the new picnic table, shoulder-to-shoulder with Luke and looking at the house the two of them built without ever lifting a hammer, Bo saw things clearly for the first time in his life. Luke wasn't always right.

"One last drive, then," Bo suggested, dumping the last few drops of swill into his mouth, crumpling the can and leaving it on the table. "Come on, for the General." For Luke and the General, because now that he was out of retirement, Bo wasn't giving the car up.

There was that unimpressed smirk, that half-somewhere-else look Luke had been giving him all week. A lifetime of that look and now Bo took it into his head to mind, because tomorrow Luke would be gone. It was one thing when Luke was only halfway present forever and quite another when that half would be gone in the morning.

Interesting how they had to learn all over again how to get into the car. Bo had the advantage, what with Luke worrying over tin cans and trash, so his cousin was barely seated on the door when Bo hit the accelerator. Funny how he tried to make it look normal when he landed all crooked, led by that cocked left shoulder. But Luke was already someplace else in his head, so whatever bruises the rough start might have left on his skin didn't hurt anyway.

He likely didn't feel those bumps as Bo leapfrogged cross-country, either, but the General did. Take it easy on the jumps, Cooter's voice kept nagging in his ear. So he did, took it real easy until him and Luke were in the middle of what had once been a farm and now was as good as wasteland, going nowhere at all.

"Bo," Luke complained, when they'd been sitting still for only a few seconds.

Years ago, he would have made it a game. Messed up Luke's hair (wouldn't have worked), shoved on his shoulder (might have worked), started a fight about nothing at all (definitely would have worked). Now he had no options, no tricks up his sleeve. There was nothing to make of what he was about to do, other than what it was.

So he put an arm around Luke, turned and pulled him into a hug. Felt Luke hugging him back. Let go just enough to get room, then kissed Luke, hard and sure, because there was no going back. It wasn't a kid's game. Used Luke's frozen shock to gain leverage, push him back onto the groaning plastic of the General's seat, full of cracks that weren't there back when the farm was bigger and time was all they had.

Cornered, was what Luke was, so Bo let him up. Let himself get shoved off, because his cousin should never be backed into a tight space like that by anyone.

"Bo." Luke was wiping a hand across his mouth, and then, "I got to leave tomorrow."

"So you said," Bo agreed. "Look," I'm sorry or I didn't mean it, but neither was true, so he didn't have the right to say them, not to Luke. Looking at the steering wheel in front of him, still feeling the buzz on his lips from where Luke wasn't anymore.

"That ain't nothing you should have done when…" Luke wasn't angry. Should have been sarcastic at least, but he wasn't that either. "I can't stay, Bo."

Yeah, well, that's what he figured when Luke told him he had to leave the next day. Overcomplicating things, Luke was good at that, even all these years later.

"So come back," Bo told him. "I ain't gonna stop you from going. You just gotta come back." Forced himself to look over at those blue eyes, that lined face. There went that adam's apple: we're in trouble, Bo.

"I can't promise—"

"Dang it Luke, you can so promise me that. I ain't telling you when you got to do it," back to looking at the steering wheel; it felt the same about him right now as it had five minutes ago. Bo wasn't sure he could say the same of Luke. "I ain't making no rules about it, except that you come back."

"Could be years." Anyone else saying it and it would have been continued denial. From Luke it was more like how he was thinking, and just being his kind of honest about it. Luke's truth wasn't cheerful or sad, it just was.

"It's already been years." Twelve, to be the kind of exact that Luke was probably being over there, still keeping his safe distance in the far corner of his side of the seat. Bo went back to looking at him again, watching how Luke wasn't halfway gone now, just sitting right there and tearing through his own brain, looking for logic or the right answer. "Ain't nothing important happened to me in all them years. I can wait a few more."

Luke didn't say anything, just looked right back at him with those eyes he'd never seen on anyone else. Never had a reason to look until he wasn't seeing them every day anymore, until he'd wandered off into a life that didn't include his cousin. Easy enough to do at the time; Luke was always there and would always be where Bo could find him, until he wasn't. Somehow it had never occurred to Bo that Luke could leave, too.

"What you got up there you got to rush back to, Luke? A girl?" It was a joke and it wasn't, the kind of thing delivered lightly, in hopes that the answer that came back wouldn't be heavy enough to crush him.

Luke just shook his head. "No one of consequence." Well, that was reassuring and at the same time, not. "It's high wildfire season, Bo. I was lucky to get away this long."

"I'll be here when you get back, then." Even if it took years, which Bo couldn't see why it should. A little prodding and Luke could come back in winter.

"Ain't you," and Luke was still slouched over there, far away and smaller than Bo ever remembered him being. "Found no one to take care of that itch yet, Bo?"

That itch, which was Bo's burden to carry. Uncontrolled libido, Luke would call it, but it wasn't that. It was wanting what he couldn't have and helping himself to what he could. It was never admitting, until today, what it would take to scratch it.

"Found lots," he answered with a shrug. It wasn't news, both him and Luke already knew that part. "They wasn't you." That there was the real truth of the matter.

Luke wasn't coming out of his corner, but he was nodding, seriously, making Bo's fingers twitch all on their own. Wiping themselves on his jeans, across his face, into his own hair. Not as much of that as he used to have, meanwhile it seemed like Luke had more.

"How long?" So many things him and Luke used to be able to say without words. Now someone had to do some talking, but half a sentence was still enough. How long have you been keeping this from me?

"Long enough," was a stupid, chicken answer. Not what he wanted to say, more the kind of thing he'd come out with when he was afraid of what he could lose, and Luke wasn't helping, staying all to himself over there. "Since before I left." Slunk away quiet like he could avoid a thrashing if only nobody ever found out.

Jesse never did know everything, though he wanted them to believe he did. Took going off to NASCAR the first time for him to realize that all the fool stunts they'd pulled were things his uncle didn't know and never wanted to hear about. They came back after only five months to an old man who breathed heavy when he walked and couldn't have wielded a strap without putting himself at risk for a heart attack. He got old, was Bo's reaction at the time, but Luke had only smirked and told him that it wasn't Jesse that'd changed. Still, Bo kept things from the old man on the basis of past threats alone.

It took walking away from Luke to learn that there were things worse than beatings. Nothing the old man could dish out hurt as much as the loneliness of spending each night with someone new, hundreds of girls from all over the country, all different and exactly the same. Not a one of them was Luke.

"You're an idiot," Luke was saying, but at least he was coming out of his corner now. Smirking and shaking his head. "You waited twelve years. And if that ain't enough, you waited one more week, to get around to it." There was a hand over Bo's, where it was resting on the stick shift. Warm touch of fingers there, and then there were those others on his face, tipping it to a convenient angle. Chaste enough kiss, promise of better things. "I'll come back," Luke said.

And the next morning, before the hassled drive to the airport, after packing and in those last seconds of privacy, Luke kissed him again.

"I'll come back," was the promise again. "Wait for me," was the condition.