Despite being absolutely exhausted by the time Harry managed to escape his cousin and his friends and all of the other horribleness of the day, Harry couldn't sleep. His mind kept playing over and over again their last tea with Professor Slughorn. The way the man had fussed about. How happy he had seemed to talk about Harry's parents. The fact that he was one more person dead because of him. There was barely room to think about the horrible look on his cousin's face when he figured out Harry wasn't going to tell him anything. Of course Sasuke wanted to know. Of course he felt like he had to know. And of course everything went to shit afterwards.
He was fairly sure that managing to mess up this whole having a family business so quickly was a bad sign about himself, but he wasn't exactly sure where he'd gone wrong about it. Maybe he shouldn't have argued with Sasuke so much. But half the time he was arguing with Sasuke it was because the other boy thought hitting something hard enough was how you fixed a problem. And in his defense, that did seem to be the way that everyone in Konoha solved things and frankly, wizards weren't much different , were they? They just used fancy spells and hexes instead. But Hermione and Ron didn't seem to see a problem with that so there must be some kind of difference between school yard scuffles and cousins fighting.
Harry spent half the night rolling over and over in his bed, balling up his blankets only to punch it flat afterwards. Sleep wasn't much relief but at least it stopped some of the awful thinking. By morning he was a little better able to handle everything. Nothing had changed. He still had the same problems to deal with. But this wasn't the first time he had faced something like this, was it? He had had to learn how to manage.
And it was easier, in the morning, not to feel so helpless and to instead feel rather peeved.
It didn't help that the first thing out of Dean's mouth was "what happened to your face?" Despite Hermione's best efforts, magic wasn't a cure-all for everything. And a shiner still stuck around a little the next day. At least it was faded to a dull greenish color. But it just made Harry angrier and angrier every time someone asked. He couldn't exactly say the new kid, who also happened to be his cousin, decided to hit him yesterday. Even if Harry was angry, he couldn't put the team into that kind of situation. Harry might not always be the most popular kid in his class – and he was very familiar with finding himself suddenly the least popular – but he had enough faith in his yearmates and housemates to know that that wouldn't go over well with them. And it would raise a lot of questions none of them wanted anyone asking.
So instead, Harry got to lie over and over again to people who just meant well and it was infuriating. Didn't he already have enough on his plate? Why did his cousin have to always make everything so much more difficult? Sure, Harry had told a few lies over the years and had his fair share of secrets, but that didn't mean he enjoyed having to cover up something that wasn't even his fault to begin with.
"Oh, come on," Ron exclaimed after what seemed like the hundredth person to come up to their table during breakfast. "You act like you've never seen a Quidditch player with a black eye before! Surely there's something more interesting happening at this school than the state of Harry's face?"
Which ended up being truer than they would have liked. It wasn't long after that that the Daily Prophet finally arrived. Hermione wasn't the first to get hers but she was one of the first to open it up to see the headline. An enlarged likeness of Professor Slughorn took up most of the front page. It looked like a picture from a party, maybe one of the many fancy ones he had told Harry all about. He looked excited at first, like he liked everyone looking at him, but it wasn't hard to miss the slightly perplexed look on the picture's face as it tried to figure out what had happened to him. It couldn't see the headline, Harry supposed, though he knew wizard photographs didn't work like that. You couldn't explain to a photo that the person it had been was now dead. Even if the large print above its head exclaimed over the gruesome murder.
"Oh, Harry," Hermione exclaimed softly. Thankfully not loud enough for anyone to hear over the general racket of a Hogwarts morning and the other shock exclamations coming from those who liked to read the paper early.
The article didn't have any pictures of what had actually happened, the writer fretting over how things were too gruesome to even put into print (which probably meant they just hadn't been allowed to, not that they hadn't wanted to). But it did describe in long, drawn out detail how the room had been blood soaked, the body left where it had fallen, throat savagely sliced from ear to ear and left gaping open. The descriptions went on and on, sprinkled in with small bits of information on who Professor Slughorn had actually been, seemingly only to remind the reader that this had been an actual real person butchered.
Harry read every word of it and didn't look at anyone. He wasn't sure how his face would look if he did. Guilty? Frightened? Far too ready to cry over a man he supposedly had never met before.
Talking with the man had been awkward at first, the Potter name clearly a focus of the man's attention, but it had been the first time another adult wizard had talked about his future like it had more to it than just defeating Voldemort. Like he might be capable of great things other than just that. And sure, most of Slughorn's focus was on how Harry could best make use of his 'bright future' but at least the man had thought Harry had one ahead of him.
"Harry, please tell me you had nothing to do with this," Hermione whispered tensely, but still managing to keep her voice low enough that none of the others would hear them. Everyone was too busy debating whether or not it actually had been Death Eaters or if there was some kind of dark creature on the loose. There seemed to be a general consensus that the amount of blood made the latter more likely.
Harry forced himself to stop looking at the picture and did his best not to look at anyone else either. "I don't want to talk about it," Harry muttered. Because what else was he supposed to say? 'I hadn't meant to but I think I got this man killed?' And he wasn't allowed to talk about it. He'd promised the Headmaster. And now things were even more serious than they had been. How could he break that promise now? They still hadn't found out what they needed to. And now they never would. And Professor Slughorn wouldn't get to tell any more stories about his old students. Or get to sit comfortably in his housecoat and drink tea that had smelt like it had a healthy dose of something alcoholic in it. Was it weird to be upset that the man's sitting room was probably now ruined? And he'd been so fussy about straightening it up when Harry and the Headmaster arrived.
Harry didn't say any more about it and thankfully Hermione didn't ask any more questions even though she probably had a dozen bubbling up already.
"I'm just glad you're okay, whatever happened," she finally said.
Ron's reply had a few more curse words in front of it, but he still managed "No wonder you don't want to talk about it. Sure you're alright?"
"I'm fine," Harry answered. After all, he wasn't the one who'd been killed in his sitting room. Why wouldn't he be alright?
There was plenty of talk at the table about what had happened. Who Slughorn had been. Why anyone might want to kill him. But no one asked the three of them. They almost seemed to make a point not to, as if they didn't really want to know. Harry half expected there to be some kind of accusation that he had been the one to do it, since that seemed to be how these things worked for him. Something terrible would happen and he'd get blamed for it. But no one even knew Harry had been out the night before. No one but Ron and Hermione, who at least seemed to be more worried about him than what had happened.
"Those three don't look too shocked," Ron muttered. While Hermione flipped through the rest of the paper looking for any clues, Ron was doing what Harry couldn't bring himself to do – he was watching Team 7.
"They didn't have anything to do with this," Harry snapped back. He was angry that Ron would suggest such a thing but he was also angry that maybe it wasn't actually that farfetched. And that despite everything he was still going to defend them.
"Debatable, but not what I mean," Ron replied with his own bit of sharpness to his tone. He seemed to let it go through with a shrug, his tone going back to that carefully mild one he used when he tried to pass messages in class or was saying something he didn't want his mum to hear. "I just meant they're being awful calm about something they were freaking out about last night."
Harry risked a glance around Ron's head. Sasuke was staring straight back at him with an expression so devoid of any emotion. Naruto was sitting next to him whispering furiously. He didn't notice Harry but Sakura looked up and waved with a tentative smile.
"Harry," Hermione reminded him and he jerked his head back around feeling angry all over again. Hermione was right. He couldn't just pretend like nothing had happened. Sasuke had taken it way too far last night. And Harry was not going to just forgive and forget it like nothing ever happened.