No chance for fate; it's unnatural selection

Sitting on the bed in the stark consulting room made Shylock feel far more uneasy than it ought to have done. He was used to this kind of thing, right down to the part where they hadn't informed him why he was here.

He'd been taking that potion. So far as he could tell (and Shylock flattered himself that he could tell better than the average person), it was doing what it was supposed to do. Was it too much to hope that they just wanted to give him another type of potion?

Robert was finishing closing up a wound on a young student who had badly splinched himself by trying an apparating spell. The lad had neither been old enough yet to be properly trained on how to do it, nor had he had permission from the school to do so. He'd tried it on an outing to Hogsmeade, and it had all gone quite sideways. The school had found the wound to be outside the resources they had on castle grounds and had brought him here. It didn't happen often that the school hospital found something above their abilities, but it did sometimes happen. The boy was lucky to still be alive.

The boy hadn't been the only casualty, Robert quickly discovered. He had had to soothe shaken school staff as well as raging parents. He'd left them, finally, at the boy's bedside, with a threadbare truce between them all. He noted the chart and was returning it to the nurses' station, the nursing shift supervisor handed him another chart as she was taking the one he was turning in.

"You'll have to deal with this one," she told him.

"What's wrong with him?" Robert asked, starting to read. Ashcroft. Hmm. The chart wasn't overly helpful with new information.

"He's not right," she replied. Robert lowered his eyebrows in disapproval. "Well, he's not." she retorted.

"If he were entirely right, he'd not be here, now, would he? What exactly isn't right about him?" he was sarcastic with her. "Nobody comes here because they're entirely alright and just have nothing bloody else to do, do they?"  She didn't reply but rather, unmoved, she shooed him off like an irritated wife. Such was often the relationship between nurses and healers.  She was efficient, but somehow the woman always reminded him of a character from an old muggle book, a singularly unpleasant woman named Nurse Ratched.  Robert silently believed this nurse, this incarnation of Ratched wasn't diabolical but she certainly was in sore need of a personality transplant.

He took the chart and went into the consulting room. "Hello, Ashcroft," he said. "How've you been?"

One of the things Shylock hated about Robert Lupin was how difficult it was to read him. It made him an extremely irritating healer. Nevertheless, Shylock decided that Lupin's breezy attitude today couldn't be a good sign. Good news started with the actual good news, not "how've you been?".

"I've been fine," he replied cautiously.

"Eating like a normal person, taking my medicine, holding down a job. Being a productive member of society, basically."

He watched Robert carefully, both out of curiosity and in the hope of easing his jangling nerves, but the other man wasn't giving anything away.

"It's all terribly boring, Doc. I don't suppose you're here to tell me I can go back to my bad old ways?"

"I see," Robert said, noticing the past tense. Been fine. He listened to the list of things Shylock had listed as positives. That was usually his preferred place to start too. As much as it sounded like life was all roses for Ashcroft, though, Robert was waiting to find out what exactly were the thorns that were with the roses.  

"I would agree with you those things can be boring. Necessary, but boring. Going back to your old ways is always an option--not necessarily a good one--but it's always there.

"I can't imagine, though, that you came here, off your normal appointment time, because it was all going alright.  So, either something's not going well, or someone else thinks its not going well. What happened that you ended up here to see me today?

A look of irritation flashed across Shylock's face. He didn't know why he'd expected Lupin to be more circuitous. He never had been before.

"I, um..."

In the absence of any desire to express himself, he fumbled for words.

"Dancing!" he lit on the excuse with palpable relief.

"I'm a dancer. I want to know if I can go back to it. Wouldn't want to rip a tendon or something."

It may have been an excuse, but it was not exactly a lie. The Daily Prophet's advice column was not nearly as juicy as Shylock had anticipated. And frankly, working in the same building as Adrienne was driving him slowly out of his mind.

It didn't take a genius to see that he'd struck a nerve with Ashcroft. He saw the young man struggle and then proclaim he wanted to be dancing. He was dancing alright. He was dancing all around the truth and looking for a way to dance his way right out of talking about what was going on.

He didn't blame him for not wanting to just simply blurt out what was at the root of things. Something was not the way it should be, and Ashcroft had told him, in not so many words, the first time they'd met that he was rather fed up with having a keeper.  He could understand that. Traps and prisons came in many different disguises.

He was just about to try a different tack when there was a soft tap on the door. Robert felt himself bristle. He didn't tolerate time with patients being disturbed unless it was a bloody good reason. The time he gave a patient was sacrosanct. Interruptions were unacceptable. As far as Robert was concerned, the building better well be on fire.

"My apologies," Robert said. "The staff should know better. Pardon me one moment," he said. He stepped outside and pulled the door behind him, offering no greeting to the tall man in the black suit that held a parchment in his hand. Robert took the parchment and opened it and read it.

It took him a breath to reel in his surprise and anger at the news in the parchment, but in the space that he'd inhaled, he'd had time to ice over, to regain himself. His tone was hushed and as compassionate as granite. He handed the parchment back to the man before him.

"You tell them," he said with a calm that was oxymoronic to the frustration he was working to suppress, "I'd better not need to come and fix this for them. I expect this to be made right by the end of the day or I will disassemble each one of them piece by piece. Is that clear?"

The man nodded and walked away. Robert didn't lose his temper often. He didn't particularly like it. He sighed, turned to open the door to go back to Ashcroft and saw that the doorknob's bolt had not caught in the strikeplate. The door had drifted open again just a fraction of an inch. It was not out of the realm of possibilities that Ashcroft had overheard him. Well, there had been nothing classified in his words, nothing he was particularly ashamed of.

He went back into the consulting room, closing the door this time to hear it catch. Ashcroft deserved better, deserved not to be interrupted again. Where had they been? Oh, yes.

"Sorry about that," Robert said in a candid but warmer tone, the anger and frustration gone. He looked at the young man and then voiced an honest question. "You asked about dancing. Why did you stop?"

Shylock leant forward, one finger in his mouth as he gnawed on the nail and tried to see what was happening outside. Unfortunately, his view was restricted. Really, the best he could do was overhear and based on Lupin's tone, Shylock was glad he wasn't in the shoes of whoever he was talking about.

Then the other man was returning and Shylock was quick to resume his former position, all innocence again.

At Robert's next question, Shylock wondered whether the healer was getting some kind of perverted pleasure from this.

"I had to," was all he said. Surely he didn't have to spell it out as well?

"Who're you going to dismember?" he asked. It was only fair.

Shylock dodged him, and then it was Robert's turn to need to sidestep. He was amused.

"Fair enough," he said casually. "Incompetence can be annoying. Collective incompetence, though, deserves a swift response." Near as Robert could tell, they'd managed to basically dodge each other again for the moment and skirt their own discomfort.

Shylock was fairly staunch at avoiding him today, and he did not believe it was because his patient was dreading him in particular. Robert didn't buy that. There was something else that Ashcroft was avoiding. He remembered that there had been a history of health issues, and there had been some degree of apparent exasperation with that. That would be enough to make someone avoidant certainly. Or avoidant of perhaps things that were worse than sitting here trying to skirt the issues. Robert figured there would be more mutual fishing required.

"Anyway," he said, "so you said you were fine--eating, taking your meds, working--that all sounds like it was alright at least initially. What went wrong, besides the boredom?"

"God, that was a joke," Shylock said, rolling his eyes. "I'm not bored. In fact, that's kind of the problem."

Wait, did he just say that? Shylock had to pause and figure out where to go from here.

"It's complicated," he said. "This whole thing was never about how I look. Corner reckons it started as a self soothing mechanism."

"So," his gaze drifted to the window now; this was the embarrassing part. "Anyway, I met this guy and he's great and I know it's stupid but all I can think is that if I put on too much weight he won't like me."

"I've never thought like that before. Before it was just... Look, this is just insane."

'It's complicated' usually meant something that was deucedly uncomfortable to talk about. Often it was a dodge. Finally, though, Ashcroft had given him a little bit to work with.

"That can look complicated," Robert agreed. He'd used something akin to that decades before when he found himself attracted to Kate--when she was dating Remus. Sometimes things actually were complicated.

"So far," Robert said, "It doesn't sound insane. Sounds reasonable so far--like you should have a right to feel out of your element.  You said this guy is great, but is there something about him, specifically, that gives you the feeling that you won't be acceptable if you lose more weight?"

He remembered that people sometimes became concerned for Shylock, and that his brother was one of those who became concerned. It was part of the reason he wanted Ashcroft to look at, specifically, this man and not at the sum of his experiences with others, if that were possible to separate that all away.