You are correct, I did not say that. But you realize that now I have to EXPLAIN this shit, right?
Okay, so, Billy Johr and Colin Ramsey are from my novel Falls the Shadow, which is the 350 page monstrosity I wrote during sophomore year and which I am now editing to be sent out to an agent. Short version: Sam Lightworth, their pseudo-adopted daughter (they’re the two Witnesses), is the Antichrist and Horseman of Death, and her brother Oz, their pseudo-adopted son, is the Horseman of Pestilence. War and Famine are kicking around too, but they don’t really matter as much here. The POINT is that Billy and Colin accidentally raised an Antichrist and the world barely missed ending. That’s it, that’s the book. And then…well. Billy and Colin. They are canonically in love, and have been since they hunted together as twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings. Billy, now sixty-three and no longer spry enough to hunt himself, is an archivist and weaponeer for every hunter of supernatural things. And the now-sixty Colin…well, Colin’s a Catholic priest…so…they’re not together and they never will be. And Adler is never going to forgive me for that. I’m sorry. Please don’t hunt me with torches.
I put my music on shuffle and got I’m So Sorry by Imagine Dragons and…um…yeah, actually, this is a snippet from while the Almostpocalypse was happening. I’m…so sorry.
“Preacher,” Billy said quietly, and Colin didn’t look at him, still standing at the edge of the porch and staring down the road. He didn’t need to look to know that Billy would step forward, stand next to him until their shoulders pressed together, the once-red hair steely in the corner of his vision. Billy was a broad, solid warmth at his side, half a head taller and steady as ages, and Colin let their shoulders bump together, acknowledgement that he was there.
“Did you hear it?” he asked, barely more than a murmur, and Billy nodded slowly beside him, looking out in the same direction—south, to Nevada, to where the Horsemen were, miles and hours away. The scream had come from nowhere, from everywhere, like standing directly beneath a roll of thunder, but the voice had been Sam’s. “The others,” Colin said, almost blank.
“Yeah,” Billy agreed. Sam wasn’t given to screaming in injury or in fear, but loss…loss would do it, every time. Colin didn’t let himself sag against Billy’s shoulder, but it was a near thing, and he could see Billy’s hand clenched tight between then. He felt like he had been encased in stone, cold and shocked. Kit, sweet and stubborn and lost. Michael, wry and powerful, with those green eyes he would turn on Sam like she was all that mattered. Oz, with his old eyes and quick smile—Oz, their boy, he was dead. The only thing that could make Sam, steely, ferocious Sam, scream like that, letting her power carry it through the world like a battering ram, would be her brother, dead on the ground at her feet.
The hollow boom, as if of great doors being broken down, was secondary to the ice seeping through Colin’s chest, but then he heard the air rush out of Billy’s chest and returned to reality.
“The sky,” he breathed. “Look at the sky.”
“I am,” Colin started to say, but the words withered on his tongue, died on his lips. The sun had gone bloody, dark and venous, almost black, and the harsh blue sky was staining scarlet, the orange-red color of flaming embers. A tremor of terror, instinctive and gut-deep, shook down Colin’s spine, and he reached out blindly until his fingers encountered the tendons standing out across the back of Billy’s fist. He closed his hand loosely around the other man’s wrist, and for a moment Billy’s hand clenched tighter still, until Colin could feel the tendons in his forearm almost creak. The tension went out of Billy’s arm altogether as the red stain spread, and Colin slid his fingers down.
He wasn’t sure when he’d reached Billy’s hand, but as the sky above them leached red, his knuckles ached with clutching it.
“And the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood,” Colin quoted, numb. “Revelation, chapter six, verse thirteen.”
Billy made a noise, his grip hard around Colin’s hand, and said, faint and distant, “What do we do?”
“Nothing,” Colin said. “We can’t—there’s nothing.”
There was a long moment of quiet as they watched the red light bleed to the horizon, the whole world cast in its eerie glow. The world was ending, Colin thought dimly. In his lifetime, no less, and at the hands of Sam Lightworth. He remembered when she had been so small, just a year old, and the thought spilled helplessly into the memory of Oz, almost five, with her hand in his and a too-old look in his blue eyes. His chest ached, now that the cold was retreating, for Oz, who was surely dead, and for Sam, who was surely lost, and for his parishioners and for the hunters who begged sanctuary at his house and for Billy, who deserved…more.
Then Billy tightened his grip and Colin finally turned to look at him. The harsh-lined face was turned toward him, tense, every crease like a scar in the strange red light.
“Preacher,” Billy said. “I—I’m glad you came. No one I’d rather watch the end of the world with.”
Colin, to his surprise, felt a smile curve his lips. Faint, shallow, but sincere. “Where else would I have gone, archivist?” Billy echoed the small smile, his sharp eyes crinkling warmly at the corners as they always did when he smiled at Colin. “Likewise,” Colin said, returning the squeeze on Billy’s hand, and he looked back out toward the south.