AN: This particular story is a mashup of reptilia28's "Don't Fear the Reaper" challenge and timbarney110's "Loyal Pet" challenge. It's meant to be both a humor fic and a power fantasy. I may include some political digressions, which are meant to explore the societal rifts in magical society which allowed the rise of the Dark Lord, and what was effectively a small-scale civil war. After all, such things never happen in happy polities. Since the Loyal Pet challenge is in effect, this story is, of course, a harem fic: a silly, slightly smutty, harem fic. Since the Don't Fear the Reaper challenge is in effect, it's also Harmony, just… not exclusively.

Prologue

In the office there were three particularly interesting things: a stuffed stag, a golden snitch, and a very familiar picture of himself, held by his ever-loving, long-deceased mother and father. It was a quaint office, not unlike the office one might expect to see a low-level bureaucrat in a parochial office of the Her-Majesty's Ministry of Magic, not that Her Majesty had much to do with it. Of course, in this particular office there was neither the expected English bulldog, nor the image of Her Majesty, but an image of a teenaged girl with pale skin and age appropriate melancholy, her raven black hair matching her dusk-black lips and her pendant, an ankh, accenting the barest hint of decolletage. He was of course, not in Britain anymore, and likely not in the land of the living, but one might never know that, except for the faint hint of immateriality about it all.

And the fact that he was floating. That might have been some hint of his situation.

Harry gawked at his surroundings, having been bent by a pretzel-curse (in which he was the pretzel) and then baked well-done but a moment before his arrival in this new bureaucratic hell. And on the desk, sat a simple nameplate: Reaper Potter.

Slight clacking steps, of stilettos on flagstone were heard behind the door on the far side of the office, approaching before halting, and finally, after a brief stamp of irritation, revealing their source to be a woman in her late teens, with bright red hair, and a petite frame, and… (Harry's breath would have caught had he been breathing), emerald green eyes, and they were furious.

"Harry James POTTER! What in the name of the Eumenides do you think you are doing back here in my office?" The woman practically growled, dumping the near ceiling high stack of files onto her, now very imposing, desk. "This is the sixth time you've come here! Are you trying to get me fired?"

"…Mum?"

"Not that I'm not happy to see you dear, but I'm very unhappy to see you right now. You are supposed to be alive, and winning the war, and fixing magical society. When they told me that my boy was supposed to be chosen one, mentor to the return of Arthur, the second coming of Merlin, I was so happy. And now look at you." Here she flopped into her seat, and shook her head, only the top of which was visible behind the files, with the disappointment of a spent woman. "You didn't even give me any grandchildren before you died! Again."

Harry felt his feet leave the floor, which they had just so recently found. Had he been alive, he was quite certain he would have felt his soul leave his body. Naturally, this was precisely what that felt like.

"Anyway, have a seat. I suppose we'll just have to go through all of this, again."

"So, I died, again, for the sixth time, while fighting Death Eaters."

The now more moderately visible Lily Potter, her tone having softened a touch, nodded in confirmation.

"And I was supposed to be able to win. Against Voldemort. And not get baked into a pretzel, and eaten by a snake."

Her foot was tapping. Oh dear, her foot was tapping. He couldn't even die without disappointing his parents.

"That's correct."

"And if I die again, you get fired. Why do they even have jobs in the afterlife anyway? Don't you get to live in paradise or something?"

The foot tapping stopped.

"Harry, do you know the rent on a condo in Paradise? Do you? It's 60,000 souls a day. A DAY! Alexander the Great gets to live in Paradise. Franklin Delano Roosevelt gets to live in Paradise. Voldemort and Grindlewald combined didn't manage to end enough lives to be considered great heroes and end up in Paradise. The rest of us have to work for a modest little flat in Tartarus. And ever since Sirius showed up that flat has gotten far more cramped than it's worth. Besides, I like my job. I got to get even with Margot Macready for making fun of me in 5th year." It was at that point that Harry was made wise to a horrible truth. His mum had died when she was nineteen. For all the time she spent in the afterlife, she was still nineteen. And she still thought like she was nineteen. Did she love him? Probably. She certainly loved baby him, at least enough to die for him. But she was not a wizened, well-matured witch like McGonagall. She. Was. Nineteen.

"Besides, you pop in every so often, even though it's far far too soon for you to be doing so again." Ah that was better.

"Now, I'm not allowed to be nepotistic, but if I get fired from this job, I'm going to be hauling boulders up a hill in the sadness mines, so I'm going to make you a deal. You get to go back… to third year… memories intact, and you have to promise me that you will try and get together with your soulmate this time, kill off Voldemort (the reaper who gets him gets a week in paradise), and make me some grandchildren." Soulmate? He was supposed to get together with Ginny after it was all over? Defeating Voldemort sounded nice. And so did grandkids. Ginny'd make a great mum after all. One who wouldn't yell at her kids for dying, he hoped.

"So… get together with Ginny, kill off Voldemort, and make some grandchildren… er children?"

"And try not to die. Now, I know you like your strumpets, if you're anything like your father, but you need to try to get together with your soulmate this time. It's your only chance to make it out alive. You've not once succeeded in even kissing the poor girl, let alone the more important things. Now this really is a topic for your father and Sirius to..."

Wait, he'd kissed Ginny dozens of times! He'd even felt her up once! This wasn't right!

"but you see, you need to actually dip your bucket in the-"

"Wait, I've kissed Ginny plenty of times!"

"Ginny?" His rather inattentive mother, who evidently had not been watching him from above this whole time, stopped her lecture on the finer points of life at the interruption, her head tilted to the side in questioning. "Ginny… Granger?"

"What? No, Ginny Weasley!" Lily ruffled through some files, and after seven or eight manilla folders went tumbling to the ground, the odd magazine between them, she found the file she needed.

"No... let's see here. Your soulmate is some Granger girl."

"Hermione?" Harry was reeling.

"I'm not sure." She handed him the parchment:

SOULMATE: Some Granger girl.

"They couldn't even include her first name!"

"That's what I said!"

Harry was aghast, so aghast that he actually started to become more transparent as he contemplated the fact that his soulmate was not "Ginny Weasley," or even "Hermione Granger," but merely "some Granger girl."

"But that could be Hermione's mum, or her aunt, or..."

"Well you'll just have to try all of them I suppose." Her high heel began to again tap with impatience.

"And what about Ginny?"

"Ginny… Ginny..." More folders tumbled to the floor, amidst used packets of ramen flavoring, and was that a… "Here we are! Well, this one has a picture!" Lily's expression changed from the triumph of discovery to a flat glare.

"Well, someone has a bit of an Oedipus complex, now doesn't he?"

"What?"

"You know, the thing where you want to shag a girl who looks like your mum, because you secretly want to kill your father and shag your mother."

"… What?" His face was hot. His face was on fire. Oh god, why now! Why now little Harry? The flat glare was now a smirk. Her wand was twirling as one long (long?) leg crossed over the other. The other hand was was rested gently on her jaw as she examined him with the faintest hint of sadistic mockery.

"You're so very like Severus you know, afraid to go after the girl you actually want, so you go for the fangirl." … Severus—Snape had fangirls? His embarrassment became outrage, and not a hint of shame.

"Hang on, if I didn't end up with my soulmate, maybe I was potioned. Or confunded. Or maybe Hermione and I secretly started going out and were obliviated. Maybe Dumbledore and the Weasleys manipulated me or something-"

"Nope." Lily interrupted, languourously popping the "p" sound, her smirk growing ever wider, as she regarded her son. "You were just an oblivious boy with no self-confidence, too much of a loser to go after the girl you really liked. Well… that and your Oedipus complex."

Harry was sinking through the floor now, positively sinking, and for some damn reason his shorts wouldn't go down. Desperately trying to control his blush, Harry tried to soldier on.

"Oh come on!" Outrage. Outrage ought to do it right?

"Nope." The popping "p" sound was even longer this time. Was she enjoying this? Was his mother enjoying torturing him with this? His very dead mother, who he'd idealized because she'd died to protec… Oh bloody fuck! "You were too afraid. For all your basilisk slaying and troll-killing, you were too afraid to go after what you really wanted. Or maybe what you really wanted was something else, hmm?" Yes, she was. She was enjoying this! "Maybe you're just a pervert." Could you even pop the "p" sound at the start of the word? Was that something you could do? Evidently his mum could.

"I am NOT a PERVERT!" He stood up in his outrage. She giggled, and looking down, he realized his mistake.

"I bet you never sat down so fast in your life. I wonder if that's a sign of something. A lack of virility perhaps?" Another giggle. A very lady-like, tempting, mocking giggle. A sign of pain to come. "Well, I'm afraid we really do have to get down to business. Do you think you can focus?" She was putting her wand down her shirt? Had she always stored it there?

"Um, yeah."

"Good. Now is there anything else I can help you with before you go?"

"Um… the horcrux in my head. Do you th-"

"Nope."

"Natural occlumenc-"

"Nope."

"What about a bigger-"

"Don't even ask." Was she... impressed? What did she…? Oh NO.

"Well what can you do?" Embarrassment and frustration were leaking out.

"Well… I can't give you any power, or magical abilities. At best I can influence your thoughts slightly, which is what I'm doing now." She began to slide under the desk. "I guess I could help you get over your Oedipus Complex."

Harry's brain had finally melted. It had been overheating for the last half hour, and it had finally melted. She was going to what? What was she doing? She was under the desk, and she was crawling. Was she looking for something? Oh my, her shirt is open. She was crawling towards him and reaching and-

"Unnh." She wasn't reaching anymore. A look of utter shock, followed by dismay, and eventually fear. Harry's embarrassment was leaking out, seeping first through his shorts and eventually through his trousers. And Lily… Lily felt fear, a terrible primal fear, a Darwinian fear, the fear that her son, her only son, was a loser, the sort of loser who had never been so much as offered a blowjob. This was a boy who had somehow made it to adulthood without even the most cursory of sexual experience (at least by her standards, having grown up in the bucking throws of the sexual revolution). Her boy, her sweet boy, was a loser.

She dusted herself off, pulling herself back in her seat, and endeavored to ignore his look of horror and pretend nothing had ever happened. "I'm sending you back now." Her boy, James' boy, was a loser. And that Darwinian fear, that primal fear in the pit of one's gut that drives one to continue the species, despite all danger and pitfalls, defying convention, norms, and taboos when one's line of ancestors from time immemorial is in danger of being ended, their branch of the tree of life severed, with fruit unplucked, and seeds unsown, that primal fear spoke to her, saying: do something. She racked her brain, trying desperately to think of something she could do to salvage the situation. A wicked smile crossed her face.

"You know Harry, forget I said anything about soulmates. Don't worry about that. Don't even worry too much about Voldemort. I'm sure you'll handle that eventually. Just try to bed as many witches as possible and be a bit more like your father." She pressed a big red buttton. Harry started to feel a tug from his navel, a tug to materiality, across time and space. Trying to move beyond his lingering, rapidly cooling humiliation, Harry tried to get one last look at his mother, to get a final snatch of her voice, maybe even… "Oh… and Harry? Pet the cat."

And a very frustrated, humiliated, and somewhat lonely Harry was dragged back to life.

AN: I'll try and update once a week. Hope you enjoyed. Next up! The Dursleys.