Time, to a child, is an ocean without a horizon. A single summer afternoon can stretch into an eternity, and the concept of a year is a vast, incomprehensible expanse. But for the sixty-year-old soul inhabiting the six-year-old, golden-haired vessel of Sunshine Addams, time was a violently ticking clock.
In her previous life, she had marked time by the healing of bruises and the agonizingly slow progression of her son's estrangement. Now, she marked it by the looming, inevitable approach of the year 1991.
She was six years old. By the fundamental laws of linear progression, the year was 1986.
Her panic attack in the nursery a year prior had fundamentally altered her trajectory. The bravado of wanting to infiltrate and dismantle the British wizarding world had burned away, leaving behind the cold, hardened slag of absolute survival instinct. She was going to avoid the narrative entirely. She would not be a pawn in Albus Dumbledore's grand, manipulative chess game, nor would she be a target for a resurrected fascist megalomaniac.
But avoidance required more than just staying in her bedroom. A successful evasion required a flawless understanding of the enemy's schedule. She needed to know exactly when the geopolitical tectonic plates of the magical world were going to shift, so she could ensure she was safely on another continent when the earthquakes hit.
To do that, she needed to confirm that the timeline of this crossover universe perfectly aligned with the fictional canon she remembered from her past life.
It was a sweltering Tuesday in July. The Addams manor was thick with the oppressive, heavy heat of the surrounding swamps, smelling of rotting orchids and ozone. Pugsley and Wednesday were currently in the torture dungeon, gleefully testing the tensile strength of the rack on a particularly robust mannequin. Morticia was repotting the strangler vines, and Gomez was occupied with a fencing instructor he had hired specifically to try and draw first blood (the instructor was currently losing, badly).
Sunshine had the west wing entirely to herself.
She slipped into Gomez's sprawling, chaotic study. The room was a monument to macabre hoarding, filled with cursed artifacts, shrunken heads, and towering stacks of international paperwork. Her target, however, was a specific, heavy iron filing cabinet tucked in the shadowed corner behind a stuffed, rearing Kodiak bear.
Gomez kept subscriptions to every major magical newspaper in the world, treating them as comedic broadsheets. The Daily Prophet, with its sensationalist headlines and Ministry-approved propaganda, was his favorite source of amusement.
Sunshine approached the iron cabinet. She reached into her navy-blue pinafore, bypassing the golden assassin's locket at her throat, and retrieved the silver, obsidian-skulled hairpin Wednesday had gifted her for her fifth birthday.
With the practiced, steady hands of a woman who had spent decades meticulously managing a volatile household, Sunshine inserted the goblin-silver pin into the complex magical lock of the cabinet. She didn't use a spell. She closed her eyes, relying on the physical mechanics and the innate, heavy hum of the Addams magic in her blood. She visualized the tumblers, feeling the subtle vibrations through the silver.
Click.
The heavy iron drawer slid open with a screech that set her teeth on edge.
She pulled out a small, glowing toadstool for illumination and began digging through the meticulously unorganized files. She bypassed MACUSA tax forms and aggressive letters from the French magical authorities regarding Grandmama's potion exports. She was looking for the archives of late 1981.
Her small hands finally closed around a thick stack of yellowing, brittle newspaper clippings tied together with a frayed black ribbon. The bold, moving photographs of the Daily Prophet stared up at her.
She pulled the stack out, shut the iron drawer, and sat cross-legged on the Persian rug, spreading the papers out in the sickly green light of the toadstool.
The headline of the top paper, dated November 1st, 1981, screamed in massive, bold font:
HE-WHO-MUST-NOT-BE-NAMED DEFEATED!
THE BOY WHO LIVED: HARRY POTTER SURVIVES KILLING CURSE!
Sunshine let out a long, slow breath. Her tiny chest shuddered.
It was real. Every agonizing detail she remembered from her past life was playing out in exact, horrifying synchronization with the calendar.
She leaned closer, reading the frantic, celebratory articles. The prose was sickeningly jubilant, entirely ignoring the hundreds of casualties the war had claimed in favor of elevating a newly orphaned toddler to the status of a messianic savior. There were moving photographs of wizards drinking in the streets of London, shooting sparks into the sky, celebrating the end of a reign of terror.
Idiots, Sunshine thought, her blue eyes scanning the moving image of Cornelius Fudge, looking incredibly pompous even a decade prior to his Ministership. You haven't won. You've just hit the pause button. The monster isn't dead; he's just disembodied, hiding in the forests of Albania, waiting for the structural rot of your society to invite him back in.
She pulled a leather-bound notebook and her charcoal pencil from her pocket. Using her jagged, runic cipher, she began to solidify her master timeline.
1986. Current year. Harry Potter is currently living in a cupboard under the stairs in Little Whinging, being systematically starved and emotionally abused by mundane relatives, all while Dumbledore's blood wards hummed contentedly over the house.
A surge of deep, visceral anger flared in Sunshine's chest. In her past life, she had viewed the Dursleys as cartoonish villains. Now, having lived through six decades of domestic abuse, she recognized the absolute, unforgivable cruelty of leaving a child in a hostile environment. Dumbledore knew exactly what he was doing. He was breaking the boy down, ensuring that when the time came, Harry would view Hogwarts—and Dumbledore himself—as his absolute savior. It was grooming, pure and simple.
She gripped the charcoal so tightly it snapped in her fingers. She forced herself to breathe, burying the empathy deep in her mental labyrinth. She could not save him. To try to save him would mean stepping onto the chessboard.
She picked up the broken piece of charcoal and continued her timeline.
July 1991. The Hogwarts letters will be dispatched. This was the absolute deadline. By this month, Sunshine Addams needed to be entirely, magically invisible to the Quill of Acceptance and the Book of Admittance. If her name was written in that ancient tome, the letters would come. If the letters came and were ignored, the Ministry or Dumbledore might send an envoy.
September 1991. The Philosopher's Stone incident begins.
1992. The Chamber of Secrets opens.
1993. Sirius Black escapes.
1994. The Triwizard Tournament. Voldemort returns.
1995. The Ministry falls to denial. The Department of Mysteries.
1996. Dumbledore dies.
1997. Full-scale war.
She stared at the parchment, her golden curls casting long, dancing shadows in the toadstool's light.
Five years. She had five years of peace before the British magical world began its rapid, bloody descent into chaos. Five years to perfect the art of being a golden, non-magical disappointment.
"Fascinating reading material for a six-year-old, my little Sunbeam."
Sunshine didn't jump. She had felt the familiar, manic static electricity in the air seconds before Gomez spoke. She casually closed the leather notebook, sliding it into her pinafore, but left the Daily Prophet spread out on the rug.
Gomez stepped out from behind the Kodiak bear, wiping a streak of sweat and a drop of blood from his cheek with a silk handkerchief. The fencing instructor had clearly put up a better fight than anticipated.
Gomez looked down at the headlines, his mustache twitching with amusement. "Ah. The British celebration of their own incompetence. You are studying the fall of their so-called Dark Lord?"
"I am studying the propaganda of a fragile state, Father," Sunshine replied, her high voice perfectly calm. "They are celebrating the survival of an infant, attributing the end of a war to a baby rather than acknowledging the fundamental flaws in their own defensive strategies."
Gomez barked a laugh, dropping into his leather chair and throwing his legs over the armrest. "Exactly! They cower behind a toddler! The entire society is built on a foundation of damp cardboard. They believe evil is a man who can be defeated, rather than a force of nature that simply changes shape."
Sunshine looked up at her father. "The paper implies the war is over forever."
"Papers sell comfort to cowards, Sunbeam," Gomez sneered, striking a match to light a fresh cigar. "A true Addams knows that the grave is merely a waiting room. This 'Voldemort'—a ridiculously theatrical name, frankly, lacking any real poetic gothic weight—will return. And when he does, those fools waving their wands in the street will be the first to weep."
"I know," Sunshine said softly.
Gomez paused, the match burning close to his fingers. He looked at his golden-haired daughter, sensing the profound, heavy gravity in her tiny frame. He didn't see the panicked survivor; he saw the tactical genius he believed he was raising.
"You are planning something, my beautiful anomaly," Gomez said, leaning forward, his eyes shining with pride. "I can see the gears turning behind those sickeningly blue eyes. You are plotting the downfall of the Old Country, aren't you?"
Sunshine stood up, brushing a speck of dust from her knee. She looked at her father, feeling a sharp pang of guilt. They loved her so fiercely. They believed she was going to be their greatest weapon, a golden Trojan Horse that would bring the wizarding world to its knees.
She was about to betray that expectation entirely.
"I am plotting, Father," Sunshine said, carefully choosing her words so they were technically true. "I am calculating the exact moment their society will collapse, and I am ensuring that when the debris falls, our family is entirely out of the blast radius."
Gomez grinned, a wide, feral expression of pure joy. "A defensive mastermind! Flawless! Let them burn, Sunbeam! Let them burn!"
Sunshine turned and walked out of the study, the heavy oak doors closing behind her. She had the timeline. She knew exactly when the fires would start. Now, she just had to figure out how to extinguish her own magical flame so completely that the Book of Admittance would look right past her.