#newtopia

The truth is, she is a new transfer student to Hogwarts. Her presence is strange, elegant but unassuming, quiet but confident. She was indeed a Muggle actress before discovering she’s a pure-blood witch. Slytherins being Slytherins, they're half-intrigued, half-skeptical, some even snide about it.

Draco lounged on the couch, feigning indifference, though his grey eyes followed every movement she made. Pansy and Blaise were draped nearby, Theo slouched with the air of someone pretending not to care but unwilling to miss whatever was about to happen.

“All right, fine,” Y/N said at last, a half-smile flickering. “You wanted to know what I did before all this? You’ll see.”

“You mean to tell us Muggles sit around watching pretend monsters for fun?” Draco asked, his drawl amused.

“You’d be surprised how real fear feels,” she replied. “Even when it’s pretend.”

The mood changes to curious excitement.

She tapped a button on the projector. The room dimmed. Light poured over stone, and Newtopia began.

The first image was gentle: a girl in a white skirt and red jumper running through deserted streets. White shoes too clean for the blood and durt on her the floor. Hair a little mussed. A face too soft for the world bearing down on it.

“She’s too cute for this kind of film,” Pansy murmured.

“Exactly,” Blaise agreed. “Makes you think she’s about to faint every second.”

Draco’s smirk curved slowly. “Until she doesn’t.”

On the screen, the girl turned a corner, slipped on a fallen cloth—and the zombie behind her pitched forward, colliding with the pavement. She scrambled up, breathless, staring at the sudden stillness.

Pansy burst into laughter; Blaise followed. Even Draco’s mouth twitched. “She just defeated the undead by tripping over herself,” he said. “That’s brilliant.”

“That scene wasn’t supposed to be funny,” Y/N admitted, half-embarrassed.

“That’s why it works,” Theo said thoughtfully. “You’re terrified and clumsy. It’s ridiculously human.”

Draco’s glance toward Y/N had less mockery now, more curiosity at the edges.

The chaos deepened. The metro station heaved with bodies and panic, people surging at the train doors, others falling, hands grabbing, footsteps echoing. The girl, small, trembling, stood in the centre of it, a white-and-red flicker in a sea of grey. As bodies fell onto the railway tracks, a train passed by and it seemed as if all hell had broken loose.

“That’s… well shot,” Blaise said.

“Why don’t they just Disapparate?” Draco muttered.

“Because they’re Muggles, genius,” Pansy shot back.

Draco rolled his eyes, but the words hardly landed; he was leaning forward without realising it, tracking the way fear trembled along the girl’s mouth.

“Still, that’s chaos. You can almost feel the panic.” mumured Blaise.

“It's… unpleasantly real.” says Draco, half under his breath.

He doesn’t admit it, but it makes him a bit uncomfortable, the powerlessness of it all.

Then a little boy appeared, eight at most, clutching a toy car. The heroine knelt to him, voice shaking but purposeful.

“You’re okay. We’ll make it, all right? Stay behind me.”

She pushed him toward the train. A woman inside leaned out, steadying him by the shoulder as if to say I’ve got him. The doors slid shut. The carriage lurched. The boy turned to wave, small hand in the window, eyes wide with hope.

“Wait… she’s not getting on?” Draco asked sharply.

“She’s giving him her place,” Theo said, not taking off his eyes from the screen.

“Why would she… oh, for Salazar’s sake, don’t be noble.” he adds, as if the heroine could hear him, the actress though hears him perfectly, as she chuckles at his reactions. Y/N living her best life, as she studies their reactions, enjoying it.

Draco leans back again, pretending to be annoyed but his jaw’s tight. “Typical. Try to do something good, and it gets you killed. It's ridiculous.”

As the train crawled forward, heads turned toward the back cars. The windows there were smeared dark. Figures pressed at the glass. The heroine, beside the boy’s grandmother on the platform, grabbed the woman by the shoulders, trying to calm her as the realisation rippled outward: the rear cars were already lost. The boy—that poor little boy—trapped between hope and a moving mouth of doom.

“He's going to die, isn't he?” Pansy whispered, but she meant the boy, the girl, the whole world.

Blaise tried to joke, “You did survive at the end, right?” but Y/N only smiled faintly. “Keep watching.”

The carriage slid out of sight. The girl stood there, chest heaving, her red jumper the colour of dusk.

Draco didn’t speak again. He only watched.

A cry tore across the platform. The grandmother ran after the vanishing train, heedless. The heroine leapt the railing and followed, trying to haul her back.

The tunnel screamed with the approach of another train. The girl froze, turning toward the lights, desperation pinning her to the trackside as the roar surged closer. At the last second, when the incoming train ground to a halt, she bolted to the fallen woman, dragged her clear, and pressed them both against the crumbling wall.

When the screeching quieted, a smaller silence settled. Then the girl saw the blood at the woman’s ankle.

“Oh no,” Pansy breathed.

“Don’t tell me—” Theo began.

The camera held on the girl’s face, realisation, horror, denial chased through her eyes. The older woman twitched. The girl recoiled, her hands shook as she lifted the hem, saw the mark. Her lips parted, soundless.

“She has to do it,” Draco said quietly.

“But can she do it?” Blaise whispered.

On screen, the heroine stiffened, tears tracing furrows in the grime. What followed unfolded with implicit movement and force, felt but not shown. When the train started up again and roared past, a red light pulsed on the face of the young girl who was clinging to survival by instinct alone. Her eyes were horrified by what she saw inside the train through the windows; red was all she could see. It was then that the grandmother turned to her, completely transformed, and lunged at her. The girl, quick in her reflexes, pushed the old woman's face away, keeping her at a distance, and in a surge of survival, pushed the woman's head towards the train. When the train departed, the girl, still holding the undead body in her fragile hands, dropped it to the ground. The moment was broken; the girl almost collapsed to her knees, trembling, defeated, her face expressionless.

Silence. Even Pansy goes still.

Theo exhaled “That’s… bloody awful.”

“Wow, the sound, I felt that. The train, the scream… Merlin.” says Blaise amazed by the genius of the production.

“She actually looks like she’s losing her mind there.” adds Pansy is more concerned about the heroine's emotion state. She glances at Y/N and then away, almost uncomfortable by how raw it feels.

Draco hadn’t looked away once. “She didn’t have a choice, did she?” he asked Y/N.

“No,” Y/N said softly. “It was her or my character.”

“Yeah,” Draco murmured after a beat. “I get that.”

The story turned. In a stark workshop, the heroine wandered between tools, eating chips from a crumpled bag. Her face was empty—the blankness of a mind that had burned too hot and now refused to feel. She weighed a wrench. A helmet. A length of chain. Then her gaze settled on a chainsaw.

“She’s eating? Now?” Pansy gasped.

“Iconic.” comments Blaise with a lazy smirk, amused.

“That’s good,” Theo said. “She’s gone numb. It’s survival instinct.”

“Muggles call this… ‘character development,’ right?” Blaise added, only half teasing.

“Something like that,” Y/N said, a corner of her mouth lifting.

Draco’s smirk returned, he almost sounds proud. “She’s enjoying herself now. Knows what she has to do. Look at that—calm, calculated, efficient. That’s what I’d do.”

The engine roared to life and Pansy actually jumped, laughing at herself a second later. Blaise grined. And Draco muttered, “Finally”. He leaned in, eyes bright, like someone recognising their own reflection in a stranger’s glass.

What followed came in pulses of light and breath. Red alarms stuttered along concrete. The fragile girl in white and red no longer trembled; she fought with a vicious grace born of exhaustion, every stumble turning into momentum. The film didn’t linger on the violence; it let the sound and the rhythm carry it—boots, breath, the saw’s feral snarl, so the Slytherins filled in the rest with their own imaginations.

“Wow. That’s… intense.” says Theo, still absorbed by the graphic horror unfolding in the scene.

“They film this? People watch this?” Blaise asked, half-awed. “I didn’t think Muggle films were this… violent.”

Draco sits forward slightly, watching her fight — eyes narrowed, intrigued. “She’s not fighting to win. She’s fighting because she can’t stop.” Or she dies he thinks but doesn't say it out loud.

The heroine paused at last in a corridor washed with emergency light. Silence swelled—thin, aching. The saw sagged in her hands. The red clot of the Zombies' a stark contrast against her white skirt, some of it on the side of her adorable pretty face.

The image shifted. She was still clutching the chainsaw as she stumbled through the tunnels beneath the city. The fluorescent strips overhead buzzed and flickered; the darkness between them felt alive. Her jumper and skirt bore the story of where she had been. Her breath scuffed in ragged pulls.

She passed an abandoned train and saw movement within. A man peered through the window, narrow face, wary eyes. He cracked the door and stepped out. A few hurried words passed, cautious, edged—but shadows gathered behind him like a second wave.

Seven, maybe eight men. Not infected. Just hungry in the way desperation teaches.

They fanned out and closed in.

Y/N’s character stepped backward, chain lax, fear waking in a different shape. She fell, palms scraping concrete, the noise echoing.

Pansy inhaled sharply. “They’re not—”

“No,” Theo said with a scowl on his face. “They’re just men.”

Hands reached, voices sharpened, the corridor shrank to the ring around her. The film kept its distance, just enough to feel the threat without naming it. She pushed, twisted, slid free on panic, bolted for the nearest carriage, and slammed the door. The men followed, shouting. Their noise rang like a bell through the dark.

She ran through the narrow passage, yanking open one metal door and then another. When she wrenched the next one back, she froze. Inside that carriage stood a cluster of unmoving zombies, backs turned. They hadn’t noticed her yet.

She turned. The men were nearly there. One more door and they’d be on her. Their voices, too loud, too close, would wake the dead.

The Slytherins leaned forward together, breath held.

The girl’s eyes mapped the space with a survivor’s math: door, ceiling, shelves, a loose helmet bobbing from its strap. She unfastened the helmet from her head, weighed it once, and sent it clattering across the opposite aisle—metal on metal, a ringing bait.

The sound drew both groups—human and not—into collision.

What followed was confusion framed in edges—boots stumbling backward, hands scrabbling at doors, the sudden surge of bodies through a gap. The girl hauled herself up into the overhead luggage rack and flattened there, a pale line in the shadow while the chaos churned beneath her.

When the noise collapsed into a smaller, uglier quiet, she slid down, feet touching the floor like a promise to herself. She ran, again, through the tunnel’s long throat. The chain in her hands dragged, dull and heavy.

“That was clever,” Blaise said, genuine respect in his voice. “And terrifying.”

Draco didn’t speak, but the hard line of his mouth had softened into something like recognition.

One more corridor. One more flicker of light. She stumbled and caught herself, and the next flicker revealed soldiers in masks and armour. She lurched toward them, tears cutting through the dirt on her face. They caught her as she fell.

The sound dwindled to a hush. The picture dissolved to white.

When the credits ended, the last light died off the stone wall, and for a long heartbeat no one moved. The lake’s green glow seeped through the windows again, faint and wavering, and the silence that settled over the Slytherin common room was thicker than before. Even the fire seemed unsure whether to crackle or stay still.

It wouldn’t just be politeness; Slytherins are good at masks, but that movie had slipped under every one of them.

Y/N didn’t speak. She only watched the flickering embers, the way shadows licked across Draco’s face where he sat opposite her, head tilted, unreadable.

It was Pansy who finally broke the silence, her voice shaky but trying to sound casual. “That was horrifying,” she said, and then, after a breath that almost sounded like a laugh, “but brilliant.”

The tension in the room loosened slightly; a few nervous chuckles followed. Pansy turned to Y/N, half hiding her unease behind a grin.

“You looked adorable right up until the chainsaw part. After that, I’m never sitting near you in a duel again.”

Blaise, lounging further down the sofa, let out a low whistle, studying Y/N as if recalibrating his impression of her. His humour return as armour. “I’ll never mock Muggle films again,” he said. “That was… an experience. Remind me never to go into their stations. How do they live like that without magic?”

His usual teasing had a note of something else, respect, maybe, or disbelief that Muggles could face such horrors without a wand.

Theo, quiet as ever, had his elbows resting on his knees, eyes on the empty wall where the last scene had just faded. “You made fear look real,” he murmured. “Too real. The way you thought, improvised, survived. That trap with the helmet… brilliant.”

There was no irony in his voice, only genuine appreciation for the strategy of it.

Y/N gave a small smile, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “I think It was instinct, mostly.”

“Instinct,” Theo echoed, as if testing the word, as though trying to understand what it meant to rely on something other than magic.

Through it all, Draco remained silent. He sat with one leg crossed over the other, chin propped on his hand, eyes fixed on Y/N. His expression wasn’t teasing or smug; it was something else—curiosity, maybe even disquiet.

He’s a boy who grew up hearing about power, blood, legacy. Watching her, a supposed ex-Muggle actress, playing a role, where her character fight, think, and endure without magic would quietly scramble something inside him.

When he finally spoke, his voice was low enough that only those nearest could hear. “You looked terrified,” he said. “Then furious. Then unstoppable.”

His gaze didn’t waver. “That wasn’t just acting, was it?”

Y/N met his eyes for a moment before answering, “No. It's more complicated,” he nods slowly, like weighing what that means. For a Slytherin who measures worth in control, seeing someone weaponise fear instead of hiding it would hit deep.

From then on, Draco would treat her differently.

In public, he’d still tease her, because that’s his defence mechanism. “So our little zombie-slayer’s a pure-blood after all. Figures.” He’d toss the words like they were casual, but his tone would lack bite.

In private, there’d be quieter curiosity. He’d ask how much of what she played on screen was her, what it felt like to live in a world where you couldn’t use a wand to protect yourself. Part of him would admire that courage, another part would resent how much it exposes his own fears.