Bo, please…please tell me you're on your way…
Luke's thought trailed away as quickly as it had sprung to his mind. It wasn't always the easiest to focus for any length of time, Jack was training to become an expert on torture methods but he sure wasn't one yet. To some extent Luke thought he would have preferred a real expert…They were nasty, very nasty, but at least they knew what they were doing.
The clumsy attempts of Jack's were something he didn't ever want to have to go through again.
Bo was at the race track, Luke wasn't exactly all sure of the time anymore, there was no way for him to accomplish more than a rough estimation of how long he had been here. He was pretty sure Bo was on the race track though, but he still prayed for him to come. He knew he was following his dream, only it had turned into a nightmare when he wasn't looking; a living nightmare for the both of them.
Bo wouldn't survive if he entered the race, and Luke wasn't sure they'd let him live either, he was after all a witness now. He didn't think he'd get off any easier because he could only see out of one eye; the left one had swollen shut after one of Jack's fumbling attempts at causing pain by expert measure.
Luke would have been willing to give a lot to be allowed to return the favor. He thought Jack was laughing now, it was very hard to hear, but he thought he was. The reason it was hard to hear was because of the insistent ringing in his ears. It had started after one of the harder blows hit him in the ear and it made him feel nothing but the deepest sympathy for Quasimodo.
He hardly felt the chains and the cuffs anymore, at least not on his left hand. It was just a solid lump of fiery pain. That was one of Jack's attempts again. At some point he was willing to bet that Jack had seen too many gangster movies…way too many.
That was when Luke had wished he had known more about what he was doing because he had made an attempt at breaking fingers, and having him there, tugging and bending trying to figure out how to do it had been enough to make Luke sick.
Jack had also insisted that Luke's faith in his cousin was misplaced. He would sneer at him, curse at him and tell him what a fool he was to trust so much in Bo. That was the easiest to bear because Jack didn't know Bo, and Luke did and knew that the faith he had was no more misplaced than a tree in the middle of the woods. He knew his baby cousin, had helped raise him when he was nothing but a baby and a small child and if there was one thing he had helped teach him was that there was nothing more important than family. That was what would bring Bo to him, the love that he knew still resided in Bo's heart for the elder Duke Boy.
He knew Bo better than anyone; he knew that no matter what, even if Bo had sworn he never wanted to see him again, he'd still come if he knew that Luke needed him as bad as he did now. It was easy to believe in that, for the same thing was true about him.
Becoming blood brothers was not something either of them had done for the fun of it on a whim. It was a way for them to show just how much one of them meant to the other. If Bo knew what was happening, he'd come in a heartbeat. The only thing that had Luke actually worried about was whether he knew or not. Jesse and Daisy would know he was missing by now, and they had probably alerted Cooter to it. Enos and Rosco were hard to tell but they would be looking, especially if Jesse had anything to say on the matter.
He tried to focus away from his hand and in a way it was easy because he could just focus on any part that hurt, and there were a lot of them. The hand was in bad shape though with two broken fingers where Jack had succeeded and one dislocated one where he had given up. He really wasn't very good at the whole torture bit either. He had been beating him, and had set out to break Luke's jaw with a well placed blow….well that plan had backfired on him when he hurt his own hand more than he hurt Luke.
That was when he had decided that fire was something that he couldn't fail with, so he had searched out a bit of a thin steal rod and gotten a fire started.
The first thing he did was hold it close to Luke's face, force him to look at it, then singed his hair with it so that he would be able to smell it. The next step was actually burning him… his arms chest and legs all underwent the torture of the white hot steel, and inwards Luke was begging for Bo to come while outwardly he screamed in pain. It would be far too easy to waver in his belief that Bo would be coming for him, and Luke could not allow himself to do that. He couldn't fail Bo so utterly. He had to keep his faith in Bo if he did nothing else, so he tried to focus his thoughts on Bo coming to rescue him.
He thought that he must have been better at it then he would have imagined, because all of a sudden he thought he could see Bo there. It was enjoyable. The look on Jack's face as Bo proved just why he had been such a successful quarterback. He knew Bo far too well to have any problem imagining the rage on his face as he pounced on Jack. He could just picture him as he dealt blow after blow and proved that Dukes stuck together, no matter what the argument was between them.
He could see how Cooter looked quite sick as his eyes fell on the hot iron now resting at Luke's feet and he made to kick it away. Then he grabbed it instead and brought it over where Bo was still beating on Jack, grabbing Bo's arm for fear that if the younger were to continue his punching frenzy, he might go down for murder.
"Easy buddy, hold there a bit." Cooter told him. "I'm gonna get Luke lose now, and ya' use this here ta make sure that bastard don't even move….but ONLY if he moves….alright?"
He handed Bo the steel rod at Bo's swallow and then nod and got out his pocket knife. Luke absently thought how that would make sense since Cooter was the owner of the hottest hot wiring fingers in all of Hazzard. Both he and Bo could pick a lock and hotwire a car, but Cooter was far better at it then they were.
"Easy now buddy, I'll have ya lose in a second." Cooter said softly and Luke gasped for air. He wasn't just imagining he rescue, he was experiencing it. Bo and Cooter were really there. He could tell because Cooter's gentle touch on his shoulder was defiantly real.
It really didn't take seconds for Cooter to have him free, then he looked over to where Bo stood. He was glaring at Jack every other second while he also kept giving Luke worried glances.
"Bo, git him over here, we can lock him up till we can get Rosco an' Enos here ta pick him up." Cooter suggested and Bo nodded grimly.
He threw the steel rod into a far corner with a look of disgust and dragged Jack over; it didn't take that many seconds for them to lock him up either with Bo snapping the cuffs on a little tighter than was normal. Luke looked at them as Cooter knelt down beside him; Bo looked furious, his gaze only resting on the now chained man sitting but a few feet away and Luke could tell he was thinking of beating Jack further, he wanted to hurt him like he and Luke had been hurt, but Luke couldn't let him do that. Knowing he had beaten a defenseless man would be eating at Bo later; Luke couldn't let him suffer that.
"Bo." He groaned, "Bo." As he had known would happen, Bo was kneeling beside him in an instant. A few tears trailing down his cheeks and a lost look in his eyes as he gently took Luke from Cooter's hold and cradled him, gently stroking away the hair from Luke's forehead.
"Luke, god Luke, what did he do to ya?" Bo swallowed.
"Ya okay?" Speaking hurt, so he couldn't say he was too eager to do a lot of it, but he needed to know that Bo was okay.
"Don't cha worry none 'bout me now, Luke. We's gotta git ya to the hospital."
Bo's voice was thick, and he sounded as if he was about to cry. Luke didn't want him to do that, not only because he didn't want to see a grown man cry, he just didn't want to think that Bo was feeling so bad he was crying.
"S' okay Bo." He mumbled. "S' okay, long as ya safe…"
He was distracted as Cooter was back kneeling beside him with a blanket that he recognized as coming from the trunk of the General. In spite of everything else, that made him smile.
"The General's safe?" He asked softly and both of them nodded.
"Ya was right Luke." Bo choked out. "Ya was right the whole time. They'd sabotaged him, they didn't care about nothing but money. I'm sorry I didn't listen Luke, I'm so sorry." Once more a few tears trickled down his cheeks as he held Luke just that little bit tighter.
"Not ya fault." Luke told him desperately, Bo had to know that. He couldn't tell Bo why he wasn't to blame yet, not having the energy to speak more than a few words at a time, but he couldn't let Bo think he was to blame. He had the golden heart, and the biggest one Luke knew of, but gold could be such a heavy burden to bear. "They's tricked ya Bo, ain't ya fault."
"They hurt ya cause o' me." Bo mumbled.
"Bo, ain't ya fault, really." Luke reached out with his good hand to brush the tear stains from his face. "Dun cry now…please baby cousin."
Bo gave a strangled sob at the old nickname, one that he had hated when he was younger but now was so glad to hear. He held Luke close to his chest and nodded, starting to compose himself as best he could. He wrapped the blanket firmly around Luke as the tremble he had taken on started to get worse, before lifting him as carefully as he could into his arms as he stood up.
"We's gonna git ya help now Luke." He said softly, looking at Cooter. He still couldn't help but feel that he had failed Luke, and he wanted to be sure he was doing the right thing from now on. As long as Cooter didn't object, he knew he had to be.
The General Lee wasn't the ideal car for hurt people, but Cooter crawled inside and helped him ease Luke in without hurting him further, seeing the gentle smile appear on Luke's horribly beaten face as he was put inside the car. Then Bo slid into the driver's seat, looking once back confidently but fearfully at Luke before bringing the engine to life and powering away.
If the way he drove to the hospital was any indication of how he would have been driving on the race track, then Cooter was pretty sure that no other car would have gotten anywhere near him. He wasn't sure if he had ever seen Bo drive like that before, and it was something beautiful to watch, in spite of the dire situation. Bo knew how to handle the General, and the General knew how to handle the road. With someone so precious to Bo as Luke in such trouble, there was no other car that would serve Bo's needs better than General Lee. He was in a class of his own, and was almost an extension of Bo as it smoothly took the corners at the high speeds Bo was pushing him to.
Then again, there was no one who held anything on Bo when it came to driving either, and that included those big names in the NASCAR world. Cooter felt pretty safe in the belief that they would be arriving at the hospital in no time. Then the doctor's would take care of Luke, and Cooter would get Jesse there to take care of Bo, because he would sure need some comfort once the shock of finding Luke had set in.
The important thing though, was that they had found Luke and Bo was safe and the two were once more reunited through the love and the incredible bond that they had between them. That was enough for Cooter at the moment until they could get Luke to the help he so desperately needed.