For QL, prompt: Incorporate the theme of 7 within your story (you can take this in any way you like — seven objects of importance, the meaning behind the number, etc)
word count: 1,229
Warnings; Talk of OCD, PTSD, and Weasley/Hermione Bashing
The Battle of Hogwarts should have been the ending of the Horcruxes... right?
There are moments when Harry, the seventh Horcrux himself, cannot help but feel as if they are still lurking around. A reminder that Voldemort could potentially come back and kill them all once Harry got comfortable in his life. A sense that something foreboding was lurking at the edges of his mind waiting for him to be at ease before it attacked him and took all that he held dear.
Hermione called it post-traumatic stress disorder, said that years of abuse at the Dursleys and the crushing responsibility of defeating Voldemort on his own had left marks on his mind that not even the most talented healer could fix. No, only 'time and patience will fix you, Harry!' At least Hermione's words seemed hopeful that the foreboding was temporary and would pass with time. Harry, on the other hand, not so much.
Everywhere he went, the number seven plagued him and set his teeth on edge. Goosebumps would rise on his arms if he saw seven of the same color sweaters or if there was a group of seven people anywhere near him. Hermione had a name for that part of his suffering as well, obsessive-compulsive disorder, since he had a focus on the number seven in particular. Harry found it ironic that he was a wizard that suffered from two very Muggle disorders, and no wizard could help him get rid of them. The wizarding world hadn't even been aware of the terms that Hermione had labeled Harry. That was, of course, until she made a mention of it in front of a Daily Prophet reporter.
THE BOY-WHO-LIVED-TWICE SUFFERING FROM MUGGLE DISEASES!?
That three-month span of listening to everyone speculate over 'what Harry had' and 'what Harry was suffering from' – as if they knew what the words Skeeter was writing about each day in her back-to-back covering of the Harry Potter Crisis! – Hermione had apologized to Harry later for her slip of the tongue, yet she'd used it as an opportunity to show that Wizards and Muggles were not so different after all. That wizards suffered from things that Muggles did as well and that they could learn from the Muggles how to treat the diseases.
Harry was tired of being a test subject. Tired of having his life put on display for the whole world to see. He had thought that Hermione and Ron, who would go along with anything his wife wanted, would have gotten the hint after all these years of Harry's name being slandered. He just wanted to be Harry. He did not want to be the freak with the Muggle diseases, the freak who survived the killing curse. He was tired.
Things had only gotten worse when Hermione had proposed that Harry talk to Skeeter about his compulsions and what triggered him. Harry had been outraged, for the first time in ten years, he'd performed accidental magic, destroying many items in Hermione and Ron's sitting room. Ron, as you should expect, blew up at Harry for getting angry with Hermione, and the whole ordeal ended with Harry being thrown out of his best friends' house with no invitation back.
The compulsions got worse that night, with Harry needing to check his windows seven times before he could properly sit on his sofa. This progressed into checking his fireplace seven times before he could sleep without nightmares, and soon enough, Harry had to get up seven times a night to repeat these acts if he had any hope of getting some semblance of rest. With each of these necessities, however, Harry got very little sleep, and it showed.
His face quickly became shadowed and full of eye-bags that not even magic could conceal. His facial hair began to grow out as Harry had no energy to shave in the mornings. His normally unruly hair laid limp and greasy against his forehead for much the same reason. Energy was a luxury that he did not have. His teeth, however, were always clean, the compulsions making him brush his teeth seven times before he could leave his bathroom in the morning. It was a grueling process that Harry was finding less energy to keep up with each day. But with the potential of Voldemort lurking in his mind, watching and waiting, Harry had no other choice, but to give in to the compulsions.
Ginny and the rest of the Weasley family abandoned him. They had heard about the fight between him and Ron and took their blood's side over Harry's reasonable response. This also only served to make the compulsions worse, shifting his glasses up his nose seven times whenever they slipped. Harry was officially all alone in a world that had been foreign to him from the start, a world that had treated him like a hero for as long as they required him and that had thrown him aside the second he was no longer needed. His uncle had been right, he was simply a freak.
It was the seventh day of the seventh month, a few weeks before Harry's twenty-seventh birthday, when a break out in Azkaban happened. The most horrific of the Death Eaters escaped causing mayhem. Harry, for the first time in months, was not the front cover of the Daily Prophet. No, the faces of Lucius Malfoy and Theodore Nott Jr. were plastered there with 'AZKABAN BREAK' written above them. The compulsions were silent. Harry felt vindicated. He had known something was wrong, that there were whispers in the dark of something approaching, and he had been right. On the seventh day of July, the seventh month, at that. Harry read the entire article and could not help the laugh that bubbled out at the end of Skeeter's words.
'Let us hope that our saviour has one last fight in him, dear readers!'
How foolish of them to believe that Harry would come running. That he could even manage to get himself out of his house without putting on and removing his shoes seven times. That he would make it in time when his teeth required seven brushings. The most foolish of all their wants and wishes was that Harry would protect a world that had shunned him. Harry hadn't had a fight in him at the age of eleven, nor at twelve, or any of the years that had followed as he'd 'proven' himself for Dumbledore's task that should have been impossible for a seventeen-year-old. The only fight that Harry had had in him had been after the deaths of Cedric Diggory, a boy who had liked Harry for himself, and of Sirius, the only family he had ever known. But even those fires had been extinguished after months at the Dursleys, the emotional and verbal abuse successfully putting out any fight that Harry had thought was his own.
No, Harry Potter would not be fighting another battle. Especially not for people who had never helped him fight his own demons. Before anyone could find him, Harry gathered all his belongings and apparated to the furthest place he could think of. His old life and all the horrors he had experienced left behind.
Harry Potter, the savior, the Boy Who Lived, the Gryffindor, the Horcrux, the diseased, the freak, was no more