Chapter Text
How Harry Potter ever got his hands on such a book was truly mundane in comparison to the events that followed because of the book in question. He first came across it five years after its publication, right on the cusp of what would be his most emotionally compromising school year. It was early in the summer of 1995, and he was fifteen. The Dursleys’ neighbor Mrs. Figg – who was in charge of Harry for the day since Dudley had a wrestling tournament to attend with his parents – had just fed him so much stale chocolate cake that he could barely move and he was forced to resign himself to a few hours of lethargy. It must have been hours he'd laid there, the ugly floral couch in the sitting room too firm for his liking, the television on a news channel he only leant half an ear to.
It was, in essence, a lazy summer afternoon the likes of which Harry swore could drag on forever. The heat was almost unbearable, coming off the pavement in waves; Mrs. Figg’s sun-faded curtains fluttered in the feeble breeze given off by the plug-in fan she had set up in the sitting room some hours earlier. Harry’s t-shirt stuck to his skin and he couldn’t help but run a hand through his thick black hair every now and then in foolishly optimistic attempts at cooling off his scalp. He glanced around for something to do, or at the very least, something to stare at besides the water-stained ceiling above him.
Mrs. Figg, who had a penchant for spending hours on end in exactly the types of places a fifteen-year-old boy would most certainly despise, frequented the secondhand bookshop in Little Whinging; she had bookshelves upon bookshelves in her sitting room to show for it, mismatched ones full of worn paperbacks with broken spines and the odd smell that comes with being stored away for too long. Harry knew she hardly ever touched them; she had placed framed pictures of her legion of cats in front of entire sections of books so they could not be readily accessed. Many of them were what appeared to be extremely dry historical fictions, the sort of novels Harry knew Aunt Petunia had a habit of picking up, reading, and immediately discarding. Nothing special, Harry thought.
But the air was thick with heat and Harry was fit to burst with boredom, and so he sat up on the couch and squinted through his glasses at some of the visible titles. The only one that stood out to him in any sort of manner was a stiff brown one called Gender Trouble. He reached out and tipped the book to get a glimpse of the front cover, pulling it off the shelf when he decided he needed a closer look.
Harry flipped the cover back. Subjects of Sex / Gender / Desire, it read in bold letters. Harry whispered the words out loud to himself, unsure what sort of sex the book was referring to, but he figured it was worth it to take the plunge just in case. He had a hunch, and it was promising.
He turned the page.