Chapter- 75 : Misunderstanding Part - 5

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She winced. "Yeah, that wasn't our finest moment."

Harry stared at her. "No. No, it wasn't. And yet since then you've not really gotten better."

"I feel like a broken record repeating myself, but I'm sorry. It's just..." She sighed. "You've heard of Iris Potter, right?"

"I don't think there's been a paper without her name in it since I got here," he said sarcastically. He held back the thought that hardly a day had gone by that they hadn't written each other either.

"Exactly. So you've read about how she's the Chosen One, fated to face the Dark Lord since before she was even born?"

"Of course. What's your point?"

"Yeah, well, what everyone seems to be forgetting is that she's a fifteen, sorry, sixteen year old girl who doesn't quite reach five foot in heels and weighs maybe seventy pounds soaking wet. Laying the responsibility of vanquishing a Dark Lord on her shoulders is a damn heavy burden."

"And what has that got to do with me?"

"Everything!" Tonks burst out, her voice filled with passion. "Though we tried to keep the prophecy from You-Know-Who's claws, once we failed and learned what it said we tried to get around it, tried to make it apply to another."

"So even the Order hasn't got faith in her." Harry's voice was filled with scorn.

"Shut your trap. That girl will fight with everything she has and if she gets even the flimsiest of chances she will take the bastard out. The point is that she shouldn't have to."

At this Harry stayed silent, because those were his thoughts exactly; those had always been his thoughts, but aside from his friends back home nobody had every spoken them aloud. Definitely not in this world as they pertained to his counterpart.

"So we sought a way around it, but once a prophecy is spoken nobody can take a Chosen's place. There's not a single person on the planet that can take the burden from her shoulders. That is when Dumbledore mentioned dimensional travel." She closed her eyes. "It wasn't fair and it wasn't even right, but if nobody from our world could take the place of an innocent, maybe someone from another world could."

"So to save a friend you would damn a stranger," he said softly.

"No!" she objected vehemently. "Well yes, but there's an important difference you're forgetting. The ritual would not just summon some random person; we could set standards! Instead of forcing an innocent fifteen year old girl to face a Dark Lord, we could ask for someone not quite so disadvantaged, someone with training and experience, someone who would be prepared and not so overwhelmed. We'd take the burden from an unprepared innocent and leave it with someone capable of coping!"

Harry shook his head and looked down. "And so you shook the tree of worlds, hoping to displace a hero, but not caring how many branches he hit on the way down," he muttered softly.

Her hair was shifting colours once again and it tinted a pale yellow that highlit her unease. "You weren't supposed to be hurt that badly. You were supposed to be this great hero who could one-two punch the Dark Lord before we did everything we could to make it up to you." She stopped there, but Harry finished the thought for her.

"And yet you got me."

"That's not what I meant."

"But that doesn't make it untrue."

She winced and was silent for a little while. "I think that's why we behaved so badly when we first met face to face. We were all desperately hoping we hadn't just kidnapped yet another innocent in our efforts to protect the first."

"You were always going to be kidnapping an innocent. Do you even hear yourself? I wasn't supposed to be hurt that badly, but I was always supposed to be hurt. And if I had these skills you were hoping for, would that have made the kidnapping okay?" What would he have thought, if his Order had gone this route to aid him?

He shook his head in disgust. "What happened to doing everything you could to make it up to me? I was threatened with the damn Imperius Curse, had to fight for money to buy clothes and apparently had a spy foisted on me pretending to be my girlfriend."

"I swear to Merlin I did not date you to spy on you."

Harry shot her an incredulous look. "So, what? You just accidentally put on the wrong face when you sat down next to me in the Three Broomsticks?"

She narrowed her eyes. "You've seen me flirt. You've seen me seductive. Did I act like that when we first met?"

Harry frowned. "No. Actually, you were kind of angry."

She scoffed. "You're damn right I was angry. Mad-eye had just ordered me to play hooker and nobody so much as objected to the plan."

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