Dope, Muggle (Harry Potter universe)

Chapter 9

Hughes seemed momentarily as stunned as Cillian had felt when he was standing in the doorway of that apartment.

"Well, strap on a dildo and call me Susie! Ain't that just a kick in the head?" Atkinson asked, breaking the glacial flow of ice that had just formed.

"Or a bomb in the face. The weird thing is that you didn't find his body. He couldn't have been standing any further than you are now, Sir," Cillian said to Atkinson.

"Well if he's survived one bomb- well, that's interesting..." Atkinson said as if realizing something very important, but he kept it to himself.

"Y- yes. Well, Officer Williams. I hate to have to do this, but I'm taking you off active duty status again, at least until you've healed-up. You're welcome to return to DST, of course - but naturally you can't be involved in any operation to pursue Conroy until the Doc signs off on it," Hughes said.

"Understood, Sir," Cillian said.

"We'll work up a target package on him in the meantime. But you need to rest."

"Welcome back to the land of the Living, you lucky son of a bitch," Atkinson said.

The two senior company men left the room then, and Cillian could see them arguing fervently out in the hallway.

Lucky?

Did Cillian really feel lucky? It was more like Cillian felt that something very bad was going to happen. Donovan Conroy was alive, and he'd stolen a prisoner that Cillian was supposed to have been guarding. The only reason that Cillian was alive was because he was out and about, spending a lovely night in the Parisian atmosphere of young love. Cillian should have guessed, in the back seat of that taxi, that it was just the calm before the fall.

Shit. How the fuck is that monster still alive?

"You feeling alright besides?" Alice asked.

"Just more questions floating around my thick skull."

"You should be grateful for that, the thick skull - the doctors were picking out fragments of human bone from your forehead for hours. Not yours, obviously," Alice said.

"Human bone?"

"Yeah, wanna see?" Alice asked playfully as she picked up a clear plastic container in an evidence bag from Cillian's side table. She shook the container a few times, and it sounded like a rattle.

"The shrapnel they pulled from your body. DCRI needs to keep all of this as evidence, but I thought you might get a kick out of it," Alice said, handing the bag to him.

"You're more enthused about bone shards than most other people I've met," Cillian remarked.

"I'm Goth," Alice said.

Cillian rolled the container around in his hands, looking at the little bits of shrapnel fall like sand in a drum as he spun the thing round and round. There were little bits of metal, wood, glass, and other things that Cillian couldn't recognize.

"Jesus, is that a tooth?"

"Number eleven, I believe, upper left canine," Alice said, with a sense of fascination.

Cillian did understand the fascination, and if he wasn't more emotionally attached to the context of it, he would have probably felt more like a child at the science museum for the first time.

But at that moment, he was struggling to understand how he felt.

"You know, I've been blown up before," Alice said.

This startled Cillian.

"What‽ Have you really?" Cillian asked.

"Yeah, on Call of Duty, sure, loads of times," Alice said, grinning wide.