Chapter Text
Hemlock Potter is having that waking dream again. It comes suddenly, in a reflection, in a flash, in the time it takes between one blink and the next.
The world around her blurs, colours swirling like blood in snow. Hemlock’s heart races as she realizes what is coming next, but it is too late to stop it at that point. One moment she is sitting at the Weasley’s dining table drinking her morning tea idly chatting with Hermione, and the next she’s there, in that dreadful place.
Her face is bombarded with blinding light and her chest, nose, and throat feel heavy, making it difficult to breathe as if she's suffocating. But she’s floating too, weightless in the lurid water, trapped in a bloody tank.
Hemlock's limbs feel leaden, yet she manages to lift her hand, pressing it against the cold glass that confines her. Through the green-tinted water, she sees distorted figures moving beyond her prison. Their voices are muffled, but she can make out snippets of conversation.
"...unstable... increasing dosage... reintegrate REM cycle…"
"...dangerous... terminate..."
Panic rises in Hemlock's chest, threatening to overwhelm her. She wants to scream, to break free, but her body won't respond. The figures draw closer, their features warped and grotesque through the glass, like monsters from a fairy-tale book.
She spies his glasses, though. Small, round black things, like two dead moons staring back at her.
Suddenly, a hand grabs her shoulder, yanking her back to reality. Hemlock gasps, her eyes flying open to find Hermione's concerned face peering at her.
"Hemlock? Are you alright?" Hermione asks, her brow furrowed with worry.
Hemlock blinks rapidly, trying to shake off the lingering remnants of the vision. Her hands are trembling, and she realizes she's spilled her tea across the worn wooden table. Ruined one of Molly’s doilies.
"I... I'm fine," she stammers, reaching for a napkin to mop up the mess. "Just dozed off for a moment."
But Hermione's sharp gaze tells Hemlock she's not fooled. "It happened again, didn't it? The dream?"
Hemlock nods reluctantly, her throat tight as if she’s still suffocating in the tank. She glances around the cosy kitchen, half-expecting to see those distorted figures lurking in the corners. To see two dead moons staring back at her from the window. But there's only the comforting clutter of the Burrow, the smell of fresh-baked bread, and the distant sound of gnomes squabbling in the garden.
"It felt so real this time," Hemlock whispers, her voice hoarse.
“It’s just a dream,” Hermione soothes, patting at her hand clutching the napkin. “Just like all the other times. Just a dream.”
Just a dream, yes. She’s had them plenty. All her life, really, as far back as she can remember. The same dream, the same tank, the same drowning.
The Healers assure her that there is nothing to be concerned about. They say that stresses from life can manifest in unusual and unexpected ways.
Yet Hemlock can't shake the feeling that it's more than just a dream. The lingering sensation of water in her lungs, the phantom pressure against her skin - it all feels too vivid, too tangible to be a mere figment of her imagination.
She forces a smile for Hermione's benefit, but her mind is racing. The voices she heard, the figures she saw - they seem to hint at something sinister, something hidden just beyond the veil of her consciousness.
Or perhaps Hemlock just needs a nap.
"Maybe," Hemlock concedes, not wanting to worry her friend further. “Maybe I should just-”
She's cut off by the sudden arrival of Ron, his lanky frame filling the doorway as he bursts into the kitchen, face flushed with excitement.
"Oi! You two won't believe what Dad just told me," he exclaims, oblivious to the tension in the room.
The dream is quickly forgotten.
The dream, as it always does, comes again.
This time, it's during Potions class. Professor Snape is droning on about the proper way to prepare moonstone when suddenly, the world shifts. The dungeon classroom melts away, replaced by the all-too-familiar confines of the tank.
Hemlock tries to fight it, to cling to reality, but the vision pulls her under like a riptide. The viscous green liquid surrounds her, pressing against her eyes, her mouth, her nose. She can taste it, sour on her tongue.
Through the glass, she sees more clearly now. The figures are in white coats, moving with clinical precision. One of them approaches, clipboard in hand. It's the man with the round glasses again, his face a blurry smear beyond the green water.
"Subject H-P-7 showing increased resistance," he says, his voice muffled but audible. "I suggest increasing the S-Cell infusion and stabilizing her Matrix. We can't have her constantly waking up."
He moves, taking the dead moons with him, and in the darkness of his absence Hemlock sees herself in the reflection of the tank.
There she was, unmistakably. Her silver hair still cropped short and severe at her shoulders, now floating about her head with the gentle flow of the water, her eyes a startling green with an unusual slit pupil that must have come from some fairy ancestor, same pale skin and same lightning bolt scar etched across her forehead. But there's something different, something wrong. Her body seems younger, smaller, more fragile. And there are wires, so many wires, snaking out from her arms, her legs, her spine.
Hemlock tries to scream, but no sound escapes her lips, can't squeeze past the pipe lodged down her throat. She thrashes against her liquid prison, desperate to break free, to understand what's happening to her.
Suddenly, a sharp pain lances through her skull. The world spins, colours blurring together in a nauseating swirl. She hears voices, distant and distorted:
"She's destabilizing!"
"Increase the sedative!"
"The glass is cracking!"
The pain intensifies, and Hemlock feels as if her very being is being torn apart. She reaches out, trying to grasp onto something, anything—
She wakes up to find herself on the cold stone floor of the Potions classroom, surrounded by a circle of concerned faces. Professor Snape looms over her, his usual scowl deepening as he assesses her condition.
“What a delightful display, Miss Potter,” he drawls, irritation mingling with concern. “I daresay your affinity for theatrics is noted.”
Hemlock meets his gaze, every fibre of her being still reeling from the remnants of the dream. As students murmur and exchange worried glances, she forces herself to sit up, the coolness of the stone floor grounding her in the reality that felt so foreign only moments before.
“I-I’m fine,” she stammers, her voice wavering slightly, but the tremor in her hand gives her away.
“Fine?” Snape replies, crossing his arms. “You were quite literally flailing through a daydream. Seven points from Gryffindor for your lack of control. Now, are you able to stand, or should I call Madam Pomfrey?”
With a deep breath, Hemlock pushes herself up, feeling the weight of everyone’s eyes on her as she sways slightly. “I can stand,” she assures, willing her knees not to buckle beneath her.
“Good. Then return to your cauldron. Class is still in session.”
As she returns to her desk at the back of the classroom, her heart pounds against her ribcage. The dream is growing more intense, more vivid with each occurrence, and reality is blending uncomfortably with the horrors awaiting her in the glass tank.
It’s the last one, Hemlock tells herself. This will be the very last dream.
It isn’t.
She's having the dream again. This time, Hemlock is ready for it. As the world begins to blur and shift, she doesn't fight the transition. Instead, she lets herself sink into the vision, determined to gather as much information as she can.
The familiar tank materializes around her, but now she notices details she'd missed before. There are numbers and letters etched into the glass: HP-7-2980. The liquid she's suspended in has a faint green tinge, and she can see tubes and wires snaking away from her body, disappearing into the shadows beyond the tank.
The white-coated figures are there again, moving purposefully around what she now realizes is a vast laboratory. Banks of computers line the walls, their screens flickering with data she can't comprehend. And there, in the centre of it all, is the man with the round glasses.
He approaches her tank, clipboard in hand, those dead moon eyes fixed upon her.
Hemlock wants to claw them off his face, dig out the eyes behind in his skull, but all she can do is float.
"Subject HP-7 showing increased neural activity," the man mutters, scribbling on his clipboard. "Fascinating. The integration is progressing faster than anticipated."
Hemlock strains to hear more, but the man's voice becomes muffled as he turns away. She focuses instead on the screens behind him, trying to make sense of the scrolling data. Words and phrases jump out at her: "neural interface," "reality simulation," "memory suppression."
A cold dread settles in her stomach, sour like the water she drowns in. This isn't just a dream. It's too detailed, too consistent. But if it's real-
Suddenly, an alarm blares through the laboratory. Red lights flash, and the white-coated figures start rushing about in a panic.
"System breach!" someone shouts in the distance. "She's breaking through!"
The man with the glasses whirls back to face Hemlock's tank, his expression a mixture of fear and fascination. "Impossible," he breathes. "She couldn't have..."
But Hemlock can feel it now - a surge of power coursing through her body, crackling along the wires connected to her. The green liquid around her begins to bubble and churn. Cracks spiderweb fissures across the glass of her prison.
"Shut it down!" the man with the glasses yells, frantically running and tapping at a control panel. "Shut it all down now!"
But it's too late. With a deafening crash, the tank explodes outward. Hemlock finds herself falling, tumbling through a whirlwind of shattered glass and sparking wires. The world spins around her, reality seeming to fold in on itself-
On her.
Hemlock fell through the wreckage of her own thoughts, plummeting deeper into darkness. Fragments of her life collided: snippets of laughter, the familiar perfume of damp and cupboard, the pressure of a hand holding hers—all slipping through her fingers like grains of sand.
“Tell me one last thing,” she asks. The words echoed as memories blurred around her, pooling into a singular moment—an encounter she hadn’t thought possible. “Is this all happening inside my head?”
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Hemlock, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” The voice was comforting yet unsettling, like a hand reaching out to pull her from the depths.
With a sharp gasp, she awoke again, sprawled on the cold, unforgiving concrete of the lab floor. The absence of warmth wrapped around her like a shroud, reminding her of the liquid she detested. She blinked rapidly, primordial alarm ringing in her ears.
Hemlock was alive.
Standing shakily, she wipes the remnants of viscous, green fluid from her face, gags as she slips the tube down her throat out with a wretch and a plop and a splatter of blood and bile, only to be met by the stark, clinical chill of the air. She scrambles for a refuge, instinct driving her forward.
Hemlock scuttles away from the shattered glass and the remains of her prison to the overturned writing table—a rickety sanctuary that felt safer than the abyss behind her. In the dim light, she shivered.
The lab was eerily quiet now, except for a soft gurgle of the dying machinery. Focus, Hemlock. Focus. She peeked out from her refuge and caught a glimpse of her captor—his body lay motionless, a grotesque tableau of death, with a shard of glass piercing his dead moon eye—a cruel irony.
Some of the white-coated figures had fled, some of them dead on the floor, but the familiarity of their presence lingered in the air like a fading spectre. A horror began to unfurl within Hemlock as the realization struck—why wasn't the dream ending?
Hemlock’s first sensations were of chaos: a cacophony of alarms blaring, red lights pulsating like a heartbeat, and a deep, primal fear gnawing at her insides. She felt weightless yet imprisoned by the confines of the glass tank, now she’s cold and wet on the concrete. Memories flickered in and out, like a broken film reel, the remnants of a life she could barely recall.
She squeezes her eyes shut from the onslaught. No. She had to focus. HP-7-2980—the number swam before her mind's eye, a designation that felt more like a burial plot than an identity. As she opened her eyes, the lab blurred in and out of focus, the dead man with dead moons for eyes stares back.
The lab stank of metal and something acrid, a sickly-sweet undertone that turns her stomach. Every instinct screamed at her to flee, yet her limbs felt heavy and uncooperative, uncoordinated. In her mind’s eye, she wrestled with the images: moments of tranquillity, sunlit laughter, and the warmth of friendship, all submerged beneath the cold detachment of the lab and the dead, broken bodies.
A sudden sound—footsteps. Hemlock's heart thudded loudly in her chest as shadows loomed across the dim-lit lab, dissolving into the pulsing light from above.
Someone was coming.
Instinctively, she pressed herself against the cold concrete, trying to will herself out of existence, praying they wouldn’t find her.
Whispers danced overhead—words that flowed like water but carried the weight of brutal truths. “We have to secure the area,” a voice said, tinged with boredom. “Clean up whatever’s gone wrong.”
“And I have to help on my day off because…” A new voice intones, softly suave and unimpressed.
“Because you’re my friend?” came the insulted retort.
A huff, a snort. “You’ll have to do better than that, Fair.”
“Because I’ll owe you one?” the voices are closer now, footsteps too, gunshots in Hemlock’s ears. “I’ll buy you that new edition of Loveless-“
They must have come in now, seen the destruction now, because everything is suddenly silent, suddenly still-
Until it's not.
“Is that a dead Professor Hojo on the floor?”
The cold bite of fear crept deeper into Hemlock’s chest, and she fought the tightening grip of panic within. The labels plastered on the walls blurred together in her mind, each bottle promising science, power, or salvation—yet here in this sterile purgatory, the promise felt like a taunt.
Clenching her fists, she dug her nails into the skin of her palms, grounding herself with pain as her thoughts crashed against one another like waves. She had to think. Her memories of sunny days and laughter felt like a distant dream, a life she was pulled from against her will.
“Check the security log,” commanded the suave voice, a knife-edge of authority that sent shivers down her spine. “It might still have footage if the motherboard hasn’t blown.”
The overhead lights hummed and flickered, casting a hue that reflected the dread pooling in her belly. Crouching low, Hemlock navigated through the shadows that enveloped the perimeter of the lab—searching for something solid to latch onto when everything felt amorphous, threatening to engulf her.
She only made it a step before glass cracked beneath her foot.
“Someone’s here,” the suave voice said, now tinged with something sharper—a predatory edge that clawed at Hemlock’s resolve. “Come out now or-“
The bored one cuts in, gentler. “We’re not here to hurt you!”
The hairs on Hemlock's neck bristled at the juxtaposition of the two voices. “Please,” she whispered to herself, the sound barely audible over the panic within her. She had to remain unseen, unseen and unheard. Her breath came in shallow gasps as she pressed herself against the cold metal of a workstation. The flickering lights pulsed with the rhythm of her heartbeat, an unwelcome reminder of the danger lurking in the shadows.
“Are you injured?” the bored one, now kind, asks, and his footsteps grow closer, dangerously close, and Hemlock huddles into herself tighter, smaller, screwing herself up into the most compact ball she could. “We can get you to a medic and you can tell us what happened,” he continued, his tone coaxing, soothing.
The other voice — sharp and commanding — interjected once more. “Enough with the niceties. If they are injured, they are a liability. We need to find them before—”
“Before what?” the bored one asked coolly. “Before her injuries get worse? We just need to talk to her. She could have information that we need.”
Hemlock’s mind raced as she wrestled with the contrasting tones, the predator and the protector weaving a mental tapestry of threat and hope. Hemlock couldn’t remember how she’d ended up here, in this chaotic whirlwind of voices, but she knew instinctively that trust was a luxury she couldn’t afford.
She held her breath, forcing herself to focus on the coldness of the workstation pressed against her back. Every instinct screamed at her to move, to escape, but every rational thought countered with the fear of drawing attention to herself.
“Go away,” her voice sounds hoarse to her own ears, unused and fallow. Young too, childlike in a way she couldn’t hide.
It didn’t slip by her visitors notice, either.
The men who found her didn’t bother to mask their curiosity. “A kid?” the kind one asks, bewilderment colouring his tone. “What’s a kid doing down here in the labs—”
But before he could finish, the suave one cuts in, his voice an unexpected presence, close enough to send a shiver down her spine. “Best not ask that right now.” His tone shifts like a storm rolling in—commanding and predatory one moment, and forgiving and smooth the next. “Hey, kid, why don’t you come out, and we can get you somewhere where the roof isn’t going to cave in any minute?”
Hemlock doesn’t move, holding her breath, the weight of their desires pressing against her skin like the cold metal of the machines surrounding her.
“Listen, stranger,” the suave one coos, edging closer, his movements almost hypnotic, wrapping her thoughts in a delicate web of his intent. “It’s not safe here. We don’t want to hurt you, but you need to come out so we can help.” His voice becomes a lullaby of promises, tempting her to trust, to emerge from her hidden sanctuary, but Hemlock has learned that trust is a reckless game.
“No… No!” The resistance surges within her, a bolt of determination igniting her voice—a flash of lightning where the suave one had been gently rolling thunder. “I’m not going anywhere with you! You’ll put me back in the tank!”
Surprised silence hangs in the air between the men, and Hemlock takes a breath, pressing deeper into the shadows, where she feels safe, despite the looming threat. The air grows thick with her uncertainty and their trepidation.
“The tank?” The kind one asks, his concern palpable. “You were… in the tank?”
No. She was somewhere else. Somewhere happy… or was it a dream? Memories swirl—colours, faces, laughter… blurred images trapped within her mind. “I’m… I don’t know where I am.” She feels lost, a fragment of a past life floating just beyond her reach.
“Hey, kid…” The suave one continues, his tone shifting to a whisper, tinged with urgency. “I know you’ve been through something terrible. But trust me, staying hidden here isn’t going to help you. You’re not safe like this.”
His words hang in the silence, a weight she cannot ignore. The world beyond resonating with tension. She knows that staying buried in her fortress of shadows may be the trap that seals her fate.
“We know you’re scared, and you have every right to be.” The kind one says, his voice softer, coaxing yet steady. “But this building’s about to crash, and there’s a storm brewing outside. If you stay here, you’ll be trapped. We can help you—get you somewhere safe.”
In that moment, a flicker of hope ignites in her chest, sparking against the concrete layers of fear. She breathes, the air trembling with the promise of freedom and the weight of an uncertain future. “Okay…” Her voice is barely a whisper, hesitant yet resolute. “Okay, I’ll come out.”
Emerging from her sanctuary feels like stepping into the eye of a tempest. Hemlock finds the two men closer than she anticipated. Their presence is a stark contrast to the shadows that had sheltered her.
The kind one, with spiked black hair and an inviting dimpled grin, blinks at her with unmasked astonishment. Beside him, the suave one, a tall redhead in a strikingly red coat, crouches down, concern flickering in his emerald eyes.
“Wow,” the kind one whistles, taking in her bedraggled appearance. “She looks just like—”
But the suave one interrupts, shuffling his coat free. “Yeah, we’ll speak about it later.” Then he turns his attention to her, “come here, kid. Let’s get you dry.”
Hemlock stumbles as she hesitates, nearly falling into the warmth of the leather coat offered to her. The arms of the suave one wrap around her protectively, shielding her from the pummelling chill of anxiety and chaos, grounding her in the midst of uncertainty.
“Easy there,” he murmurs, ensuring her balance is found. The warmth envelops her, the scent of leather and something musky wrapping around her like a blanket. For a moment, the outside world fades, the chaos muted just enough to allow her heart to steady.
It happens faster than Hemlock expects. A gentle lift, and suddenly she’s airborne, cradled in his arms. Her heart races, instinct screaming for her to pull away, but a quiet part of her revels in the sensation of safety, however fleeting it may be.
“Hold on tight,” he instructs, his breath warm against her ear, reminiscent of soft sunlight breaking through a storm. She clings to him intuitively as the world tilts, “we’re getting out of here.”