Prelude 1: Aphrodite's Chosen

Disclaimer: If I owned these characters, I wouldn't be living in a studio apartment listening to my neighbors have sex and scream at each other all day and night. I'd be living in an expensive suburb with a well endowed pool boy and a naked girl with amusing piercings chained up in my kitchen.
Author's Note: While not my first attempt at writing fanfic, this is the first one I've published anywhere. Please feel free to be as critical as you like. I'm a big girl, and I can take it.

                Harry Potter woke up. This in itself wasn’t strange, he’d done it thousands of times before. Even the sensation of waking up and not knowing where he was or how he got there wasn’t really all that strange given the number of times he’d woken up in the hospital wing of Hogwarts.  But waking up face down on a marble mosaic of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus was definitely new.

                Harry slowly rose to his feet and took a quick inventory. All limbs accounted for, no currently bleeding wounds, and nothing seemed to be cursed, hexed or jinxed. Spectacles, testicles, wand, and watch. Everything was where it was supposed to be. Except him.

                He was currently in what appeared to be a Greco-Roman courtyard. There were several kinds of fruit trees scattered around. Harry could see apples, limes, and pomegranates, as well as several rose bushes. Most of the trees had doves of one kind or another in them.

                There were also a large number of fountains. Each was carved of white marble and adorned with either a half naked woman, or a half naked woman mixed with some sort of ocean motif. And all of the fountains had swans swimming in them.

                “Ok, so where the bloody hell am I?” Harry muttered.

                He was answered by a very female giggle.

                Drawing his wand as he moved, Harry spun around to face the source of the noise. “Who’s there?” Still, he saw no one.

                “Hello Sugar-Britches.”

                Harry turned again, and again there was no one there. “Show yourself!”

                “In a minute.” There was another giggle. “What’s the last thing you remember before waking up in my garden?”

                “What? I was fighting…” Harry paused. “I was fighting Voldemort… I killed him. He’s dead. I won.”

                “Congratulations Sweetie. And then what happened?”

                “And then…then there was a searing pain in my chest…and I looked down…and…and…”

                “And what?”

                Harry raised his hand to his chest, feeling for a wound that was no longer there. “And there was a spear of ice sticking out of my chest.”  Harry fell to his knees. “Am I dead?”

                “Sort of.” A shower of pink and red hearts appeared before Harry. They dissolved into a woman in her early twenties with long blonde hair wearing a sheer wrap over a Hawaiian print bikini and bejeweled sandals that laced up her legs with pink ribbons. “I kinda jerked your soul out of your body about half a second before you were dead.”

                “Who are you?” Harry stood slowly.

                “Aphrodite, Goddess of Love.”

                “Are you really?” He tilted his head slightly to the right, peering at her closely.

                Aphrodite raised an eyebrow at him and sighed. “I suppose I’m going to have to put the whammy on you then.” She shook her head. “No one ever believes me.”

                “Oh I believe you,” Harry said. Then he punched the goddess of love in the face.

                “OW!” Aphrodite rubbed her cheek. The slight red mark left by Harry’s fist was gone. “What was that for?”

                “Ten years in a cupboard, bitch.”

                She grimaced. “Ok, I can let you have that one. But only the one.” Aphrodite drew herself up. “But now we have to talk about your life.

                “What about it?”

                “Most of your it wasn’t supposed to happen the way it did, Hun.”

                Harry rolled his eyes. “Oh good. I’m glad to know that all the shite I went through was a cosmic accident.” A pensive look slid over Harry’s face. “So assuming that you really are Aphrodite—“

                “I thought we already covered that.”

                Harry ignored her interruption. “That leads one to assume that the rest of your pantheon is real too.”

                “They are.”

                Harry nodded. “Okay, let’s work from there then.”

                “From where?”

                “Well, I have read a bit about the Greek gods, and I know that none of you involve yourselves in the affairs of mortals unless there’s something in it for you.” He looked directly in Aphrodite’s eyes. “What do you want from me?”

                “It’s not that easy Harry, I can’t just—“

                “Ah yes, the evasion. I’d forgotten about that,” Harry smirked. “We must observe the niceties after all. Will we be getting to the cryptic non-answers soon?”

                “Fine.” Aphrodite crossed her arms over her chest and pouted. “I’ll just lay it all out for you.”

                “Good. Much less confusion that way.”

                “It’s like this,” the goddess began. “While it was your father’s time to go,  your mother wasn’t supposed to die that night.”

                “So why did she?”

                “Because she couldn’t find her wand.”

                “What?”

                “Well, that night, your parents made love. They’d just finished and were getting dressed when Voldemort and Pettigrew arrived. Your father grabbed his wand and ran down the stairs half naked. He managed to immobilize Pettigrew before Voldemort killed him.”

                “And my mother?” Harry whispered.

                “Her wand had rolled under the bed. She looked for it, but when she heard Voldemort kill your father, she ran to get you. Voldemort caught her just as she was about to jump out the window with you in her arms. I think you know what happened from there.”

                “What was supposed to happen?”

                “Well, when your father died, the spell he had Pettigrew under broke. He was supposed to stun Lily, and then Voldemort was to go upstairs and hit you with the killing curse, which would have rebound and disembodied him. But because she didn’t have her wand, she didn’t rush down the stairs with your father.”

                “And my mother would have lived, so I wouldn’t have lived with the Dursleys.”

                “No, you wouldn’t have even met them until you were five. You, your sisters and your brother would have been raised by Lily and your step-father.”

                “I would have had siblings?” Harry sat down hard on the edge of a fountain.

                “Yes. Had your mother lived past that night, she would have given birth to twin girls nine months later. Then, three years later a little boy.”

                “Who…who did she marry?”

                “Two years after your father died, your mother would have married Sirius Black.”

                “Bloody hell….”

                “Yeah. So many things were changed, simply because your mother couldn’t find her wand.”

                “Who moved it?”

                “Eris. Goddess of Discord.”

                “I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you have some kind of half-baked divine scheme for me to fix everything.”

                “Well, I have a plan anyway.”

                “Before I hear the plan, I want to hear what you get out of it?”

                “In exchange for the chance to fix the timeline, I want you to build me a new temple.”

                “That’s it?” Harry looked skeptical.

                “You would of course have to become one of my priests, and recruit others to worship me.”

                “Hmmm….let’s hear the plan before I agree to anything.”

                “I send your soul back to the night your parents died. You make sure your mother finds her wand so she doesn’t die.”

                “And how do I do that?”

                “Your best bet would probably be to hide in your parents room until after Discord moves the wand. Then when Discord leaves, move it back to where she can find it and get back to the nursery so Voldemort can mark you as his equal.”

                “You want me to stay in the same room with my parents while they have sex?”

                Aphrodite shrugged. “Can you think of a better way to do it? Besides, if you’re going to be running a temple for me, you’re going to have to get used to seeing that kind of thing sooner or later anyway.”

                Harry sighed. “Fine, what else?”

                “Well when your soul goes back, you’ll keep your memories, and magical ability. So if you do it right, you can get rid of Voldemort’s Horcruxes before he’s restored to a body. That should help when you have to fight him again. Which reminds me…”

Aphrodite reached out and put her hand on Harry’s chest.  A sharp burst of pain flared through Harry’s body. He knocked her arm away.

“What the hell was that?”

“Just a few gifts from your patron goddess.”

“Do all of your gifts hurt that much?”

Aphrodite grinned and wiggled her eyebrows. “Only if you’re into that kinda of thing Sugar.”

Harry blushed. “So what did you do to me?”

“Gave you an animagus form, and a natural ability for occlumancy.”

“Those could come in handy. What’s my form?”

“A dolphin.”

“A dolphin?”

“Yeah. Delphinus delphis actually. Also known as the short-beaked common dolphin.”

He shrugged. “Better than a beetle I suppose.”

“So are you in?”

“Yeah.” Harry stood up. “I’m in.”

“Good. There’s a couple more things you need to know before I send you back.”

“Like what?”

“First of all, this is a one time thing. Any changes you make to the timeline, you have to live with them, so try not to screw anything up as you go along.”

“So, no pressure then?”

“Second, you can’t let anyone from the Ministry of Magic know you’re from the future. They’ll stick you in a hole in the Department of Mysteries and keep you under the imperius curse while they pump you for information.”

“Glad to know the government is working with my best interests in mind.”

“Third, don’t try to recruit Hermione. Athena already called dibs on that one.”

“That would explain why she’s a Gryffindor, and not a Ravenclaw.”

“Now there’s one more thing I need to teach you before I send you back.”

“What’s that?”

Aphrodite smiled and waved her hands. Harry blinked as a cascade of hearts surrounded him. When he opened his eyes, they were sitting on the edge of a large heart-shaped bed.

“Well Sugar, if you’re going to be extolling my virtues to the masses, I think you should have some idea of what exactly my virtues are.”

Harry gulped as his goddess leaned in to kiss him.