The tail end of June at Hogwarts carried an atmosphere of profound, almost manic surrealism. The castle had barely finished scrubbing the petrified students from the hospital wing and sweeping the dust of a thousand-year-old serpent from the sub-basement corridors when the administration decided to pivot immediately back to normal, polite institutional functioning.
The tragedy of the Chamber of Secrets, the near-death of a first-year student, and the literal presence of a basilisk running through the plumbing were treated by the governors as unfortunate operational hiccups.
The most magnificent manifestation of this bureaucratic detachment arrived on a Tuesday morning during breakfast. Professor McGonagall marched down the center of the Great Hall, her expression tight and unyielding, distributing a series of gray notices to the student body.
Sunshine Addams sat quietly at the Hufflepuff table, slicing her kippers with precise, methodical movements. She took the slip of parchment handed to her by the Transfiguration professor, smoothed it out, and read the bold, unfeeling print.
Due to the exceptional circumstances surrounding the security breach this term, all practical end-of-year examinations have been officially canceled by order of the Board of Governors.
A collective roar of unrestrained joy erupted from the Gryffindor table. Several students threw their goblets into the air, while others leaped onto the benches, hugging one another in utter disbelief. Even the Hufflepuffs exchanged looks of immense, breathless relief, sagging against each other as if a physical weight had been lifted from their shoulders.
Sunshine continued to chew her fish. Her sixty-year-old mind did not share in the jubilation. She kept her eyes fixed on the remaining lines of the notice, reading past the comforting promise of canceled practicals.
However, to maintain academic integrity and ensure appropriate progression, all theoretical examinations previously administered or scheduled will be graded, weighted, and permanently recorded toward cumulative grade point averages.
She let out a silent, internal sigh.
The British magical education system was predictably, painfully transparent in its hypocrisy. They were too terrified to let children hold wands for fear of liability, but they were entirely willing to grade them on the conceptual mechanics of those exact same lethal spells.
For the ordinary student, canceled practicals meant an easy pass. For Sunshine Addams, who spent her evenings in the library memorizing magical law and theoretical physics while pretending to struggle with basic homework, it meant something entirely different.
It meant her scores mattered.
Two days later, the written exam results were quietly slipped onto the Hufflepuff common room bulletin board.
Sunshine stood in front of the parchment, her hands folded neatly over her beige cardigan, projecting the picture of anxious, trembling curiosity. The other badgers clustered around her, chattering excitedly about their passing grades.
"I passed Charms!" Hannah Abbott squealed, grabbing Sunshine's arm and shaking it gently. "Even without the practical, I passed! Oh, Sunshine, look at yours! You always do so well on the theory!"
Sunshine smiled weakly, peering at the sheet.
Her name was listed near the top of the Hufflepuff second-year cohort. Not first in the school this time—she had carefully dialed back her ambition, intentionally injecting three minor structural errors into her Transfiguration essay regarding cross-species mutation curves to ensure she landed comfortably in the upper-middle tier of the bell curve.
She was safe. She was respectable. She was entirely unremarkable.
Except for one glaring, administrative anomaly.
In Ancient Runes—a class she technically didn't take, but whose independent study texts she routinely perused as a boredom-busting exercise—her name appeared at the very top with a score that had apparently caused someone in the grading office to leave a heavy ink smudge.
S. Addams: 98% (Exceeds Expectations / Advanced Theoretical Merit).
Sunshine's eyes narrowed slightly behind her innocent facade.
A miscalculation, she realized with a cold, sharp jolt of irritation. I answered the translation of the Third Eihwaz rune using the Northumbrian dialect rather than the standard Anglo-Frisian variant. It marked me as an independent researcher of archaic dialects rather than a stumbling Squib.
She needed to fix it before a professor—specifically Professor Sprout or, worse, Dumbledore—began asking questions about how a non-magical second-year student was casually translating dead runes used in blood wards.
Later that afternoon, during the chaotic, packing-heavy hours before the end of term, Sunshine requested a brief audience with her Head of House.
She stood in Professor Sprout's cluttered, humid office, surrounded by potted Mandrakes that were currently wearing tiny, knitted earmuffs to muffle their juvenile wailing.
"You wanted to see me, Miss Addams?" Professor Sprout asked kindly, wiping potting soil from her thick leather gloves. The Herbology professor looked exhausted, the stress of the past year etched deeply around her eyes. "Is everything packed for the express?"
"Yes, Professor," Sunshine said, her voice dropping into its most fragile, breathy register. She hung her head, letting her shoulders slump. "I... I actually wanted to talk to you about the posted scores. Specifically, Ancient Runes."
Sprout raised a graying eyebrow. "Runes? You aren't officially enrolled, dear. You just borrow the texts for reading."
"I know," Sunshine whispered, letting a single tear of manufactured distress form in the corner of her eye. "I shouldn't have even looked at the test paper Professor Babbling left in the library annex last month. I tried to translate it out of curiosity, just to see if I could understand the words without the magic. But... I got it wrong. I mixed up the dialects entirely. It's all nonsense."
Sunshine pulled a scrap of parchment from her pocket—a piece she had deliberately scrawled with crude, grammatically atrocious runic nonsense—and handed it to the professor.
"I didn't want the registry to think I was cheating, or... or pretending to be something I'm not," Sunshine stammered, her voice cracking with the performance of a child terrified of getting into trouble for being too smart. "I'm a Squib, Professor. I can't even hold a wand. Seeing my name up there with a high score... it feels like a mistake. It's embarrassing."
Professor Sprout looked at the crude scrap of paper, and then looked at the golden-haired, trembling girl before her.
The Herbology professor's expression softened into an expression of profound, aching sympathy. The institutional cruelty of placing a non-magical child in a school designed to highlight magical achievement suddenly weighed heavily on her conscience.
"Oh, sunshine," Sprout sighed, stepping around her desk to place a warm, dirt-stained hand on Sunshine's shoulder. "Don't be hard on yourself. You have a brilliant academic mind. It's only natural that you try to conquer the theory when the practice is closed to you."
"Can we take it off the board?" Sunshine pleaded, looking up with wide, swimming blue eyes. "Please. I don't want the other students to make fun of me."
"Consider it done," Sprout promised gently, patting her shoulder. "I will speak with Professor Babbling. We'll mark it down as an administrative error in the cross-referencing. Go on and pack your trunk, dear."
"Thank you, Professor," Sunshine whispered, offering a small, pitiful smile.
She turned and walked out of the office, the door clicking shut behind her.
The moment she was out of sight in the stone corridor, her posture snapped straight. The trembling vanished. The watery residue in her eyes evaporated.
Crisis averted, she thought coldly, sliding her hands into the deep pockets of her beige skirt, feeling the cold metal of her hidden bracers. The system is easily manipulated by its own pity. Never let them see your competence; let them see your vulnerability, and they will happily erase your mistakes for you.
She walked back down to the Hufflepuff basement, entirely unbothered by canceled exams, weighted scores, or institutional chaos. The second year was officially in the books, and the wallflower had successfully pruned her own success.