Dueling Dukes Chapter 37: Love Will Keep Us Alive, a dukes of hazzard fanfic

37. Love Will Keep Us Alive

I was standing
All alone against the world outside
You were searching
For a place to hide
Lost and lonely
Now you've given me the will to survive*

"Daisy," he said as held a cool cloth to Luke's forehead, "is awfully worried about you."

Tired blue eyes rolled up to meet his, squinting against the scant light of the lantern. "You saw her?"

Bo nodded and left the cloth where it lay across that dark brow. "Earlier tonight. It's Saturday," which was the day Luke had instructed her to come back. Bo couldn't swear to it, but he figured that a man who was used to commanding feuding men as if they were an army battalion should have a good sense of what day it was. He hadn't much moved on Wednesday or Thursday, though. Probably lost track of time somewhere in there.

"She didn't go back to the gang, did she?"

"Nope. And she don't want to put you at risk by coming here right now neither, so she's staying with Pastor Jesse." Bo pressed the back of his fingers against Luke's face, feeling the heat there. Still warm, but not as bad as it had been. With any luck there'd be no need to give him another cold water bath and watch him shiver miserably. Doc said the less they had to move him the better for his shoulder, too.

"That's good. Them boys would be after her to do something—what day did you say it is? Saturday? I been missing for a while. They'd be after her to find me. Or find out what happened to me."

Yeah, Bo knew that; they'd discussed it once already. Luke was still fevered, a little delirious maybe, but he was better than he had been. At least his words made sense now. He wasn't hollering about looking out for trees (and Bo couldn't figure what harm a tree could do a man unless it was falling) or claiming Bo was going too fast when he was doing nothing but standing still watching Luke writhe.

"She needs to lay low until I can get back and wrangle them boys back into some sort of shape. A few more days, maybe." Eyes all but closed.

"Cooter says it'll be a couple of weeks before you're ready to be on your feet again." And then only if the infection didn't come back. Luke's wound was open now, no longer stitched, with a few added gashes where the doc had been forced to cut into him. Covered over loosely by a bandage so it could breathe, and every time the dressing had to be changed and Bo caught sight of it again, it made his stomach curl into itself and sent a chill through him. "And then you can finish recuperating at the church." That part had been Bo's idea. The Hickorys figured Luke for dead, but they had no confirmation. They had to be steadying themselves to be on the receiving end of some retaliation. Soon enough they'd learn about the complete disappearance of Yellow-eye and he figured by then they'd start combing the area looking for where Duke and his infamous scout were hiding out. Or trying to prove they were both gone, and whichever way it worked out, there'd be some serious fighting in the streets of Trenton. About the only place that he figured neither side would dare to touch was the church. Not when it was protected by an old grizzly bear like Jesse.

Luke's left hand came up to grab Bo's wrist and his face registered only a small wince for the way the movement pressed his right shoulder a little harder into the bed.

"It can't take that long," he asserted. "My men, they ain't going to hold themselves together for weeks like that. Besides, the Governor's wedding party ain't going to be in town but for a couple more days."

Oh, so that was what the banners hanging from all the balconies on Monroe Street had been for. Bo could tell something was happening, but he had been too busy worrying about what news Daisy was going to bring down from the hill and figuring out how to tell her about Luke's setback and then leading her to safety to take any time working it out.

"They'll hide out that long, but then they're going to want to—I don't know what."

Bo used his free hand to pull Luke's fingers away from the grip they had on him, then to get him to rest his arm at his side again. "You settle down," he mumbled, then took to soaking the cloth in cool water and setting it across Luke forehead again. "That feud, it's been going on a lot longer than you've been in it. There's been lieutenants before you that have come and gone, and the men in the middle of it all, they just keep letting themselves be led. You can't take responsibility for what they done before you got there, and you can't worry about what they do when you ain't there no more, neither. They'll manage." And some would get themselves killed while others got out. But more would come along and the ones that stayed would hardly notice the faces around them changing. Bo couldn't even swear that Doolin and Leadbelly properly recognized that the he had never come back. Though it seemed to him like a tall blonde fellow and your best horseman ought to be the sort of thing you realized you'd left behind at some point.

"I ain't gone," Luke explained, his voice rough and tired. The man was still fighting infection; there was no two ways about it. "I ain't leaving the feud."

"Then you're a fool," Bo informed him rationally. Figured he'd drop it there, deemed the point unworthy of an argument right now while Luke clearly wasn't thinking straight.

"I ain't quitting," Luke insisted. "I ain't done what I got to do yet."

"Gotten your revenge, you mean." Luke's arched eyebrows arched betrayed his surprise. "Luke," he said calmly, patting at those flushed cheeks with the wet cloth. It probably wasn't doing much for cooling him off, but it was an excuse to touch him gently, to try to soothe him away from the fight that he was hell bent on having. "I admit your past is sad." Worse to have had family then lost them, he'd decided, then to have never had them at all. Heck, just waiting for Daisy to come back down the hill and tell him whether or not he was a Duke had just about ripped Bo apart from the inside, and he'd only had the idea in his head for a week or so. Hard to imagine growing up with a family for seventeen years, then losing them.

"It wasn't sad," Luke informed him. "It was—It wasn't perfect, maybe, but it was dang close. We had the farm, the livestock, the house—"

"And each other," Bo finished for him. "You ain't avenging a farm or a house, Luke; it's the people you miss."

"Bah," came back at him, but oddly enough, he reckoned it meant Luke agreed with him. He just wasn't ever going to admit it.

"They're gone, and that's—more than sad, it's terrible. And I'm sorry." He really was. In those first days of recuperation, he'd seen signs of the boy Luke once was, the pieces of his childhood self that he carried with him. Bo rather liked that lad and already figured he missed him, even if he'd only he'd only had moments of him at a time. "But I don't see how killing someone else is going to make it right."

"Of course you don't," Luke accused. "You ain't never woke up in the night to find your house burning down."

No, he hadn't. He could admit that, he could see where he had no right to judge Luke, and where he ought to just shut his mouth and keep his thoughts too himself. But that was just too damn bad; he had something to say on this matter and it was going to get said.

"You said it was just about perfect. You had a farm, a house, your kin. How is killing someone going to get those things back?"

Rolled eyes, and if Luke could stand to move that much, Bo would probably be getting hit right now. Or at least shoved. "You can't go back. Ain't no one gets to go back. You got to go forward and play the cards you're dealt."

"All right," Bo agreed, "that sounds good. So here's your cards: you got a hole in your shoulder, you got a bed underneath you, and you got a fever. You play them cards."

"Fine," Luke snapped, closing his eyes.

"No, not fine, because I ain't done yet. That's just your first hand. Now here's the next one you're about to get dealt. When you get better, you got your pa's farmland, you got Daisy, and oh yeah, you got me. We ain't your ma and your pa, but me and Daisy's your kin, and we ain't gonna sit back and watch you get yourself killed over the past."

One blue eye opened, focusing on him. "You're my kin." Luke didn't believe it for a minute.

Bo shrugged. "Daisy said I look just like a tintype of your grandpa Jedediah. Maybe I'm Albert's son, or Katherine's. Jesse thought I was maybe Isaac's." But it didn't matter, Bo realized. "Ain't no one can prove for sure I'm a Duke, but ain't no one can prove I ain't, neither. Daisy thinks I am, I think I am, and sooner or later, you're gonna want to claim me too. So I don't care who my ma or my pa might have been. I got you, and I got Daisy, and that's all that matters."

"Well," Luke said, "that's fine. I reckon it's okay with me if you call yourself a Duke. I got no quarrels with that." Bo smiled; Luke's eye closed again. "But I do care who my pa was. And I ain't gonna rest until I get whoever killed him."