The human body, regardless of how much ancient, dark magic it houses, is ultimately bound by its own nervous system.
When the sheer, unadulterated terror of the wizarding war finally registered in Sunshine's sixty-year-old consciousness, her five-year-old physical vessel simply malfunctioned. The panic attack hit her not with the gentle onset of anxiety, but with the brutal, kinetic force of a high-speed collision.
Her vision tunneled, the edges of the nursery blurring into a dark, swirling gray. A high, sharp ringing pierced her ears, drowning out the ambient sounds of the manor. Her tiny chest seized, the muscles locking down so tightly she felt as though an iron band was constricting her ribs. She tried to gasp for air, but her throat had seemingly sealed itself shut.
In her past life, panic attacks had been a familiar, agonizing companion. They usually struck after a particularly violent episode with her husband, when the adrenaline faded and the profound, inescapable reality of her trapped existence took over. She knew the mechanics of the panic. She knew she wasn't actually dying.
But knowing you aren't dying does absolutely nothing to stop the sensation that you are.
Sunshine slipped off the vanity stool, her legs giving way entirely. She hit the cold stone floor, her golden curls spilling across the rug. She scrambled backward, her hands scrabbling desperately at the floorboards, driven by the pure, blind instinct of a hunted animal seeking a burrow.
She crawled backward until her spine hit the solid wood of her cream-colored wardrobe. She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her small arms around her legs, curling into the tightest, smallest ball possible. She buried her face in her knees, her small shoulders shaking violently as she fought to draw a single, ragged breath.
I can't go, her mind screamed, a frantic, echoing loop of pure terror. I can't go to that school. I won't survive it. The Dementors. The Cruciatus Curse. The war. I'll be tortured. I'll be used. I can't go back to being a victim. I can't. I can't. I can't.
The grand, arrogant declarations she had made in her father's study and the sub-basement archives felt like the foolish, ignorant boasts of a child who had never actually felt a blade slice through flesh. She had let the Addams aesthetic fool her into thinking she was invincible. But she wasn't. She was just a woman hiding in a toddler's body, and the monsters across the ocean were real, armed, and utterly devoid of mercy.
A shadow detached itself from the gloom across the room.
It moved without making a sound, gliding over the Persian rug with the absolute, terrifying stillness of a cemetery apparition.
Sunshine, lost in the hyperventilating void of her panic attack, didn't notice the approach until a small, freezing cold hand clamped down on her wrist.
Sunshine gasped, her head jerking up.
Wednesday Addams was kneeling in front of her. The pale three-year-old wore a simple, stiff black nightgown. Her heavy, raven-black braids framed a face that was completely, unnervingly devoid of emotion. Her dark, bottomless eyes locked onto Sunshine's wide, terrified blue ones.
Wednesday did not offer a hug. She did not ask what was wrong. She did not offer soothing words or gentle pats. The Addams family did not coddle weakness; they analyzed it.
"Your heart rate is dangerously elevated," Wednesday observed, her high, flat voice ringing with clinical precision. "Your pupils are dilated. Your epidermis is producing excess perspiration. You are experiencing a severe physiological terror response. It is highly unseemly."
The sheer, unapologetic bluntness of the observation cut through the static in Sunshine's brain like a scalpel.
"I... I can't breathe," Sunshine choked out, a pathetic, high-pitched wheeze.
Wednesday tilted her head slightly. "You possess a functional respiratory system. The restriction is entirely psychosomatic. You are choosing to suffocate."
It was the most aggressively unhelpful, unsympathetic statement anyone could make to someone having a panic attack, and yet, coming from Wednesday, it was incredibly grounding. It wasn't an insult; it was a simple statement of biological fact.
Wednesday reached out her other hand and pressed her small, icy palm flat against the center of Sunshine's chest, directly over her violently hammering heart.
"Stop it," Wednesday commanded. It wasn't a request. It was an order delivered with the heavy, unyielding authority of a future gothic matriarch. "You are the eldest. You are the vanguard. You are not permitted to shatter. If you break, Pugsley and I will be forced to conquer the world without you, and Pugsley lacks the necessary strategic foresight."
The cold weight of Wednesday's hand, combined with the bizarre, terrifying logic of her demand, acted as an anchor. The sixty-year-old survivor forced her conscious mind to take the reins back from her panicked amygdala. She focused on the freezing temperature of Wednesday's skin against her chest. She forced herself to inhale, a long, shaky, whistling breath through her nose.
Hold for four seconds. Exhale slowly through the mouth.
She repeated the cycle. The iron band around her ribs began to loosen. The gray edges of her vision slowly receded, bringing the yellow walls of the nursery back into sharp, agonizing focus.
Wednesday watched her carefully, leaving her hand flat against Sunshine's chest until the frantic, hummingbird heartbeat slowed to a manageable, steady rhythm.
"Better," Wednesday declared, dropping her hand and sitting back on her heels. "What, exactly, induced such a pathetic display of mortal frailty?"
Sunshine leaned her head back against the wood of the wardrobe, her body utterly exhausted, drenched in cold sweat. She looked at her little sister. She looked at the pale, emotionless face, the dark eyes that were destined to see horrors.
If they went to Hogwarts, Wednesday would be a target. She was a dark witch by blood and nature. The Light would hate her, and the Dark would try to recruit or break her.
"I realized something," Sunshine whispered, her voice rough and hollow. "About the old country. About the school."
"That it is a breeding ground for bureaucratic mediocrity?" Wednesday offered, deadpan.
"That it is a slaughterhouse," Sunshine corrected, her blue eyes hardening into chips of frozen ice. "They are going to go to war, Wednesday. A bloody, vicious, magical war. The kind of war that doesn't care how clever you are, or how many poisons you know. The kind of war where children are caught in the crossfire and crushed by men playing god."
Wednesday stared at her, absorbing the information. She didn't look afraid. She just looked mildly intrigued by the prospect of mass casualties.
"Then we shall bring a larger guillotine," Wednesday stated simply.
"No," Sunshine said, shaking her head. The panic was gone, replaced by a cold, absolute, unshakeable certainty. The bravado had burned away, leaving behind the hardened steel of a survivor's ultimate defense mechanism. "No, we won't."
Sunshine pulled her knees tighter to her chest, resting her chin on her arms.
"You do not walk into a burning building just to prove you are fireproof," Sunshine murmured, speaking more to herself than to Wednesday. "You do not sit at a table with men who want to use you. I spent a lifetime playing by the rules of monsters, trying to outsmart them from inside their own cages. I died for it."
Wednesday's brow furrowed almost imperceptibly at the mention of dying, but she remained silent, allowing the golden child to speak.
"I am not going to Hogwarts," Sunshine vowed, the words dropping like heavy stones into the quiet nursery.
The decision felt like a physical weight lifting off her shoulders. It was the ultimate, logical conclusion. She didn't have to be a sleeper agent. She didn't have to be a vanguard. She just had to survive.
"I will bind my core if I have to," Sunshine continued, her voice gaining strength, shifting from the hollow whisper of a victim to the calculating murmur of an architect. "I will force my magic so deep into the earth that the British Ministry's Trace will never find me. When the Hogwarts letter arrives, I will burn it. If they send an envoy, I will convince them I am a Squib. I will feign incompetence. I will be the pathetic, non-magical anomaly of the Addams family, and they will leave me behind."
"You would hide," Wednesday summarized, her tone entirely devoid of judgment, merely analyzing the tactic.
"I will avoid," Sunshine corrected softly. "There is a difference. Hiding implies fear of discovery. Avoidance is a tactical refusal to engage. I will stay here, in America. I will stay in this house, where the darkness is honest and the monsters love me. I will not be a pawn in Albus Dumbledore's war."
Wednesday stood up, smoothing the front of her black nightgown. She looked down at her golden-haired sister, her expression unreadable.
"A coward's strategy," Wednesday noted.
"A survivor's strategy," Sunshine countered, her blue eyes flashing.
Wednesday considered this for a long moment. Then, she gave a single, slow nod. "Very well. If you choose the path of the unseen, ensure your invisibility is flawless. It would be highly embarrassing if you were caught."
Without another word, the three-year-old princess of darkness turned and glided silently back across the nursery, climbing back into her iron crib and pulling the heavy velvet blanket up to her chin.
Sunshine remained sitting on the floor against the wardrobe.
She had made her choice. The Crossover Revelation had terrified her into absolute clarity. She would not fight the British wizarding world; she would simply refuse to participate in it. She would spend the next six years perfecting the art of being entirely, magically uninteresting. She would build her mental labyrinth, she would study her poisons, and she would lock her dark affinity away in a box so tight that no Quill of Acceptance would ever write her name.
She looked at the blank parchment on the vanity, the timeline of horrors she had mapped out.
Let Harry Potter have his destiny, Sunshine thought, closing her eyes and letting the comforting, heavy silence of the Addams manor wrap around her. Let the Light and the Dark tear each other to shreds. I am Sunshine Addams, and I am sitting this one out.
It was a brilliant, foolproof plan of absolute avoidance.
And it was entirely doomed to fail.