In an isolated system entropy can only increase

Shylock's heels clicked on the hard surface of St Mungo's floors as he made his way upstairs. If it were up to him, he'd be skipping these appointments, insisting he was fine. Monroe would check he'd come, though. He was somewhat surprised Monroe hadn't hired a house elf to make sure he ate his vegetables.

Chains at his hip jangled when he knocked on Lupin's door. He'd dressed especially for the occasion. If he had to be tortured, nobody was getting out of this easily. Skinny jeans encased long legs, offset by a dazzlingly shiny blazer that changed colour when he moved. Both wrists bore spiny leather cuffs. However, in a symbolic nod to Lupin's status, Shylock's swept back hair was merely blond today. Besides, it would have clashed terribly with the blazer.

It was one of Robert's shifts to see patients, and so he was in the small, simple office in the healer's wing, not the larger administrative office he had on the top floor. He rather liked healer's duties.  It was grounding. There was nothing glamorous in some of the things a healer saw, and he liked the balance it gave him.


Between patients, he documented in charts, wrote potions prescriptions, signed orders, and waded through a mountain of charts. There was nothing glamorous in that either.


He got up to stretch his legs a bit and walked to the window to momentarily take advantage of natural light in order to read the chart of the next patient.  Ashcroft. He remotely recognized the name, but it didn't immediately ring a bell in particular.  Scanning the chart, he saw this was the first he was to see Shylock, and as he was reading, the knock came on the door.

"Come in," he called.

Disappointing. Shylock had - perhaps naively, in hindsight - expected the man to come to the door himself.

He subtly shifted his weight onto one leg so his posture mimicked his sisters'. Or Destrey's at least. He tried not to think about how quickly Lusk was growing up.

The swing of his hips as he strode in only served to make the chains clatter all the more. It was obvious which chair was intended for him, and as Shylock sat in it, he incidentally pushed it as far from the desk as he could.

He rested an ankle on his knee and Shylock's gaunt frame made the reason for his appointment clear.

"Mind if I smoke?" he asked.

"Not at all," Robert said casually, closing the chart for the moment. "Its fine with me."  He enjoyed a decent cigarette himself on rare occasion. He sat in the other chair, simply observing Ashcroft. Appearances were important to most people to some degree, and they were sometimes used either to entice or deflect.  Or both.  Bold as the clothing was, it only told him what Ashcroft wanted people to see, whether or not it was the "real" Shylock Ashcroft.

The unavoidable thing that Robert did notice was the man's thin and rather fragile frame. He had not gotten this way overnight.  This had happened over time, perhaps some considerable time.  That didn't tell him much. There were countless reasons that were possible. The other question that Robert needed a clearer answer to was what brought Ashcroft in now, today in particular?

"So what brings you in today, Mr. Ashcroft?" he asked.

What the hell was wrong with this man?  This was a hospital.  If Shylock had attempted to smoke within a foot of Connistone Hall, not to mention his parents' lab, he'd have been cursed to within an inch of his life.  And deserved it, too.

Still, his bluff had been called, so he lit up.  There was little else he could do.

"It's a regular appointment," he explained. "My darling brother schedules them."

He took a drag of the cigarette, and saw how to make this a delightful afternoon.

"You should know him.  Monroe.  Has his eye on your job.  Not this one, the other one."

A wicked grin of anticipation spread across Shylock's face as he informed the older man of this fact. He was fairly sure Monroe didn't want the Ministry to know what his ambitions were.

He nodded slightly, acknowledging Shylock's resistance to his brother's insistence. Robert knew something about brothers, after all, and the push-pull that siblings seemed to eternally have. For himself, while some of that tension had come from how they were different, there always seemed to be more explosive potential in how they were the same.

"Oh. Monroe," he said, now getting the connection. He smiled slightly at the comment that Monroe wanted the Minister's post. Robert believed that was just expected. Nearly every wizarding kid wanted to be Minister at some point or another, like muggles wanted to be royalty or presidents.  "Well, best of luck to him, then," Robert said.  "He's got time for that."

This wasn't Monroe's appointment, though, even if he had been who scheduled it. "So, shall we address Monroe's concerns for your health, then? Or shall we address yours? This is your time, your choice."

"Monroe doesn't have concerns for my health," Shylock growled, leaning forward. "He has concerns for his reputation. He can't dislodge you with a less than impeccable family backing him up. Thus, he needs me not to die of malnutrition."

He leant back, took another drag of the cigarette.

"Although, if I did die, he'd find a way to swing it. Get the empathy vote, kind of thing. Perhaps that's why he sent me here? Maybe he's hoping you'll kill me. Two birds with one stone."

There was another pause, while Shylock's brain tried to catch up with his mouth. He ashed the cigarette onto the floor.

"I just want to know I'm not going to break something," he said decidedly. "This wasn't deliberate."

The lie was smooth, practised.

"Alright, then. So, whether its genuine or not, he prefers you to address appetite issues and general overall health. And you're somewhat on the same page with that. For what its worth, though, I didn't think you did do this purposely.


"Can you tell me, though, how this did start for you?" In the wizarding world, this could often come from something dark, a dark curse, a dark arts potion, or some such ilk.  And then there were the countless physical maladies that could cause it. If those things were all ruled out, it was always possible that something had gone so sideways for Shylock that he'd been hurt enough that it had taken a physical toll.  


The proper course was to deal with the organic first. That, for the wizard, was always examining not just the physical issues that could happen to any human, but also to address the body's additional magical systems. 


If that all checked out, then, what remained was usually the darker, difficult emotional issues, and that was usually seen as the uncharted territory that few patients ever wanted to travel. That wasn't exactly in Robert's repertoire.

Shylock's eyebrow rose in disdain.  

Robert Lupin was proving nigh on impossible to rile.  He certainly lived up to his family's reputation in terms of empathy.  However, Shylock had been treated like porcelain by everyone for the last three years and it had got on his nerves long ago.

"I don't have appetite issues," he corrected sharply.  "I have an eating disorder.  I won't collapse into a puddle of tears if you say it to my face."

He leaned back in the chair, tilting it until he could rest his head against the wall, and closed his eyes.

"How far does your patient-healer confidentiality go, Mister Lupin?" Shylock enquired.  "I'm not putting myself or others at risk."

"I have some... let's call them proclivities... that aren't exactly the norm.  Certainly not in the wizarding world," he explained.  

"When I was in sixth year our potions professor was very keen on practical demonstrations and that was fine by me because there's nothing I hate more than a boring potions lesson."

"But there was a girl named Macmillan in our class.  Very dramatic.  Apparently she had a problem with her health.  And on this particular day, she and I were the ones chosen to demonstrate the effects of polyjuice potion."

"In the beginning, it was fine. D'eath always struck me as the type who'd experiment on his own house just to prove a point, so I thought I was in for the same treatment as her.  Amelia never knew when to shut up. So by the time we got to drinking the actual potion, he let me off."

Shylock's eyes snapped open, and he let the chair fall back to all four legs, but kept his eyes from Lupin's face.  He'd never contextualised the story for anyone before, but if anything was going to shake Lupin up, this would.

"I'd been experimented on before that," he explained. "I knew what I was missing out on."

"So after that class, I was getting the shakes, I was breaking down in other classes, I couldn't keep anything down anyway.  Not eating just seemed to help.  Until it didn't any more."

Ah, and there it was. The biggest 'tell' about Shylock Ashcroft that, while Ashcroft probably had no intention of revealing it, spoke more loudly so far than the chains, the leather, the vibrant blazer, or any of the rest of it. 

He didn't respond when Ashcroft corrected him, and then, now understanding something about the way Ashcroft's mind seemed to work, Robert was satisfied to listen to the explanation of how his patient had come to be in this situation. 


It made sense.  Lorcan D'Eath had not been exactly a model father, and while Lorcan was known for dark dealings, he had never been known to be particularly brutal or violent himself. Not directly anyway.  His children, however, were another matter. Particularly Alistair, who had been a professor for a brief time, and he'd also had his father's abilities at potions. Robert had never liked Alistair's reputation of finding amusement at someone else's expense. 


MacMillen--Amelia.  Yeah, he had known Amelia, and she could be a bit overly emotional. It made sense that Alistair would perhaps have found her easy bait, probably bait that at that moment D'Eath had found more exploitable than Shylock.  Well, what Ashcroft was saying made sense as to how he'd gotten put into a situation that was not one he could get out of easily.


He didn't plan on acknowledging that had he been in Ashcroft's shoes in that classroom, he most likely would have agreed with him.  Robert loathed anyone who felt a need to make potions boring or dull. He might well have volunteered for the demonstration too, but with a few ulterior motives of his own at work.


Slughorn had caught on to Robert's insatiable need to "liven up" a dead potions class by bollixing up something in order to get a rise out of either his classmates or out of Slughorn himself. Slughorn had responded to Robert's need for mischief by driving Robert harder, but now Robert had appreciated what he'd gained out of it.  And--greater still, he understood the message it would have sent if Slughorn had, in some way, rejected him, found him unacceptable.


"Your information is safe with me," Robert said, ironically understanding at least something about this young man who appeared, in so many other ways, to be so different from Robert in just about every other way. "Thank you. That's helpful. What have you found, so far, that either works or doesn't work?The reason I ask is that I'd prefer to avoid putting you through a lot of redundant efforts.  I don't believe in wasting my patients' time or energy if I can help it largely because I think its disrespectful. I'm fine with doing whatever we both believe is useful, but that means, to me, that your voice is more important than anyone else's in this--more than your family's, and ultimately, more than mine. Providing you're good with having that level of control." It was something Robert did try to offer, but not everyone was good with it.