"Oh, and Ron?"
"Yeah?"
"Put out the fucking cigarette."
Ron Weasley rolled his eyes, almost involuntarily, at the terseness of his best friend's order. Obediently and aggressively, he crushed the stub of crumpled white paper and tobacco against the delicately frosted grass, and exhaled without joy. The smoke curled away on the still air, leaving its distinctive scent as an invisible tattoo. Peering through the strangely luminescent gloom, Ron could see Harry break cover, and swiftly enter the church. He shivered slightly, and pulled his collar roughly up around his freezing neck.
They had come so far together, Harry and himself, not to mention their countless friends and supporters on the side of Light. It was strange to think that a year ago, they had all huddled beneath Hogwarts' cavernous roof and mourned the death of Albus Dumbledore, thinking it the end of Light, and of any hope.
All apart from Harry.
Dumbledore's death was only the birth of a new and frightening strength in The Boy Who Lived, a resilience that was altogether inspiring and unnerving. Beneath this transformed leader, the Order of the Phoenix had become something else entirely - an army, a rebellion party, a force to be reckoned with. Secrecy was no longer a priority, and Ron, in his moments of uncertainty, often questioned whether revenge was the new fuel on which they ran. It seemed so.
Still, it couldn't be said that the Order were the weaker side. Countless Dark wizards had fallen beneath their collective wand, and the remains of their opponents had scattered to far and obscure reaches. Voldemort was still alive, a fact that fanned the fire of war within Harry to a blaze. Ron had watched him become steadily more consumed with finding the Dark Lord, denying himself sleep and food to scour through papers, interrogate countless suspects and scribble out the endless possibilities on yards of parchment. This was one such possibility - Harry had wrested from an anonymous informant that this particular church was to be used as a drop-off point for some new, twisted technology scrabbled together from what remained of Dark magic and scraps of Muggle creations.
Ron shifted in the cold, waiting for Harry's voice in his ear. His left foot was quickly going numb, and he longed for the burn of nicotine in his throat.
Destroying the Dark Charter was one of the more brilliant accomplishments of the side of Light, and essentially caused the sudden, near-fatal fall of Dark wizardry. The Charter was the object that allowed Dark magic to function with the viciousness that it had so gloried in, created thousands of year ago by nameless and cruel wizards who had first begun to warp magic beyond its amiable limitations and into something perverse.
A deeply magical creation, it had taken months to find it, and more than they were willing to give to destroy it.
Ron coughed brusquely, and extracted another cigarette from the packet with shaking hands.
At the funeral, Hermione's arm had been black with charring and melted like some gross wax figure beneath the glass of her casket. Her perfect, perfect lips had been pale, like dead rosebuds, and Ron had clung helplessly to Harry's hand as they stared down at her corpse. Her wand, splintered with the effort of ripping apart the Charter, was a stump in the burnt flesh of her right hand. Self-sacrifice had always been an unfortunate habit of hers.
"Our Father, which art in Heaven..."
Harry began to intone quietly in his ear. Ron inhaled deeply, spreading the Marauder's Map out with one hand and removing the cigarette from his mouth with the other. "Checking the map now."
The Charter's destruction had transformed the way in which Dark wizards the world over worked - with most of their magic rendered useless, Deatheaters were resorting to Muggle weaponry, enchanted with the few malicious jinxes and hexes that had been untouched by the effects of the obliteration of Dark magic. Avada Kedavra had been rendered powerless, as had incalculable other spells that caused harm and pain. Other magics, less malevolent, had also been unaccountably changed - and the Marauder's Map was one such item. Although the Order had been able to manipulate the magic within it to display surrounding areas rather than just Hogwarts, it was unable to display the names of the people in its confines, and from time to time the image flickered as though receiving poor reception.
Ron could see the blueprints of the church in spidery ink, and the smudges of people.
"Okay, confirm position and number of visible life-forms."
"...Give us this day our daily first floor, six, and forgive us our trepasses..."
Ron tapped the parchment, checking that it was displaying the first floor, and glanced over the stationary figures scattered about the sketched building. Five.
He blinked, frowned, and checked again.
"...si- ...wait a second..."
Harry must have counted wrong.
"...who tresspass against us. Ron, check the first floor, now. Lead us not into temptation..."
"Okay, but- ...life forms on the first floor, one. Har-"
"But deliver us from evil. I'm going to investigate. Send them in now. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory..."
Ron didn't know what, but something was definitely not right. If someone Harry could see was not appearing on the map, it meant that they did not want to be seen. "Harry!" He hissed, spurring his frozen legs into action and weaving drunkenly towards the back of the church, where Seamus and Zacharius were lying hidden to provide back-up.
"Forever and ever, Amen." There was a tone of finality in his oblivious friend's whisper, and Ron had to restrain himself from screaming.
"HARRY!"
He could see the dark, blurred outlines of his two comrades, crouched low in the shadows. He started towards them, dropping the lit cigarette and speaking urgently as he went, "Something's wrong with this, st-"
Ron saw the falling figure before he could finish the sentence. Black robes billowing, it seemed to him like a massive bird of prey, swooping down onto Zacharius and Seamus as if they were helpless, fragile mice. Voice frozen in his throat, he watched soundlessly as the person jumped - for it was undoubtedly a jump, not a fall - from the church tower's tiny stone window, onto the men below. The life form on the first floor.
With the sickening thud, the figure landed, and Seamus' roar of pain forced Ron into action. He ran at the struggling tangle of robes, just as another stranger, similarly dressed, launched himself from the same window and tackled a winded Zacharius.
An ambush. "SHIT!" Ron swore heatedly, fumbling for his wand as he saw Seamus lifted into the air and thrown impossibly far across the dim church grounds. Then utter horror struck, filling his insides with a coldness. Harry.
A gunshot resounded from inside the church, and Ron felt as though he were about to pass out. Zacharius, who was battling one of the inhumanly strong robed figures, managed to gasp at him, "RON, GET HARRY!" His face was ashen; clearly the same thought had occurred to him as to the redhead.
Ron didn't pause to think. In these situations, Harry mattered most. It was an unspoken rule.
He wheeled around, and sprinted, dodging gravestones and collapsed fences.
"RON!" Harry yelled in his ear, and he almost killed himself practically flying across the rest of the grounds, into the huge, heavy doors. His heart was pounding somewhere in his throat, choking him.
And suddenly he could see his best friend, fighting for breath as yet another black-clad figure held him aloft with a cruel, gloved hand. It dimly entered Ron's frantic mind that that this creature could not be human, its strength was so effortlessly immense. "HARRY!" The name practically spilled out of him as his desperate eyes fixed on the panicked face of The Boy Who Lived.
Then Harry's captor drew a gun, and searing pain shot through Ron's thigh as the bone there splintered.
He fell in what felt like slow motion, Harry's screams resounding in his rapidly deafened ears, and one thought occurred in his fuzzy, blackening brain - 'I've lost him.'