If death was a silent, weightless drift into a merciful oblivion, rebirth was a violent, screaming eviction from it.
Nothing in her sixty years of suffering could have possibly prepared her for the sheer, unadulterated agony of being born with a fully developed adult consciousness. The literature she had consumed, the fanfictions and fantasy novels where protagonists cheerfully woke up in new bodies as if waking from a pleasant nap, were egregious, unforgivable lies. There was no gentle opening of the eyes to a new world. There was only trauma.
The void that had cradled her contracted into a vise of unimaginable pressure. She was being crushed, squeezed through a tunnel of grinding, physical torment. The sensory deprivation shattered, replaced by a catastrophic overload. She could feel her bones bending, her skull shifting in ways that sent shockwaves of pure panic through her mind. She tried to scream, but she had no air, no breath, no voice. She was trapped in a tiny, restrictive vessel that was being forcefully expelled from warmth into an abrasive, freezing reality.
Then came the light.
It wasn't the gentle, ethereal glow of a heavenly gateway. It was blinding, searing, and viciously bright. It pierced her newly formed, hopelessly sensitive retinas like heated needles.
Suddenly, the crushing pressure gave way to empty space. The shock of the cold air hitting her wet, exposed skin was electrifying. And then, the most terrifying sensation of all—the desperate, involuntary gasp for oxygen. Her new lungs, tiny and unused, flared with burning agony as they inflated for the first time. The air felt like shattered glass slicing down her throat.
The scream she had been holding back in the void finally tore free, but it did not sound like the weary cry of a sixty-year-old woman. It was a high, thin, piercing wail of a newborn infant.
I am alive, her mind shrieked, reeling in absolute horror. I am alive again. Why? Why couldn't you just let me rest?!
The chaotic noise of the room rushed in, bombarding her undeveloped ears. There was the rustle of heavy fabrics, the sharp clinking of metal instruments, and the low, rumbling crackle of a massive fire burning nearby. But above all the environmental noise, two voices anchored themselves in the swirling vortex of her panic.
"By all the horrors of the abyss, Morticia, she is magnificent!"
The voice was male. It was incredibly close, rich with a passionate, theatrical vibrato that rolled r's and vibrated with an intense, manic energy.
"Careful, mon cher," a second voice responded. This one was female, smooth as dark velvet, low and terrifyingly calm. It held a hypnotic, almost narcotic quality, laced with an aristocratic darkness. "You are squeezing her little ribs. We wouldn't want to break them on her very first night... not before she's had a chance to enjoy them."
The infant, possessing the traumatized, world-weary soul of a woman who had just been shot in a train station, froze. Her wailing hitched in her burning throat.
Morticia? mon cher?
Her blurry, unfocused eyes, squeezed shut against the harsh light, snapped open. The world was a mess of shapes and shadows, completely lacking definition. But looming above her were two faces.
One was a pale, striking oval framed by straight, impossibly black hair that seemed to absorb the light of the room. The lips were painted a stark, blood red, curved into a serene, almost predatory smile. Beside her was a man with manic, wide eyes, a pencil-thin mustache, and a wildly expressive face. He was dressed in a dark pinstripe suit, and he was staring down at her with a look of absolute, unhinged adoration.
"Look at her lungs, Tish!" the man crowed, bringing a cigar perilously close to the baby's face. "Such a powerful, ear-shattering wail! Like a banshee wailing over a fresh grave! She has your mother's temper, I'm sure of it."
"She is perfect, Gomez," the woman murmured, reaching down with a pale hand. Her fingernails were long, sharp, and painted a deep crimson. She gently stroked the baby's cheek. The touch was ice-cold, yet strangely, fiercely protective. "A tiny, fresh soul, ready to be corrupted by the miseries of the world."
The protagonist's mind flatlined.
Gomez. Morticia.
It was impossible. It was a hallucination induced by a dying brain. She was bleeding out on a dirty train station platform, and her desperate mind had conjured the very fictional characters she had used as a shield against her pathetic reality. That had to be it.
But the smell of the cigar smoke was too pungent. The sharp sting of the cold air was too real. The paralyzing lack of motor control in her own tiny, flailing limbs was entirely physical. She tried to speak, to demand an explanation, to ask what circle of hell she had been banished to, but all that escaped her lips was a wet, gurgling babble.
"Oh, Gomez, look," Morticia said, her smooth voice suddenly hitching with a rare, genuine note of shock. Her cold fingers moved from the baby's cheek to the top of her small head.
"What is it, querida?" Gomez leaned in closer, his mustache tickling the baby's forehead. "Does she have a third eye? Cloven hooves? Please tell me she has cloven hooves!"
"Worse," Morticia breathed, a look of profound aesthetic tragedy crossing her beautiful, pale features. She picked up a damp cloth and gently wiped away the remnants of the birth from the infant's scalp.
The protagonist felt a strange, cold dread pool in her tiny stomach. What was wrong? Was she deformed? In her past life, she had been thoroughly ordinary, aggressively plain. To be born into the Addams family with some grotesque mutation would probably be a badge of honor, but Morticia sounded genuinely dismayed.
"By the dark lord's decree..." Gomez whispered, stepping back slightly, his eyes wide with horror.
"It's... yellow," Morticia said, her voice dropping to a scandalized whisper. "Gomez, her hair. It's golden."
The baby blinked, her infantile brain struggling to process the adults' absolute horror over her hair color.
"Blonde?" Gomez gasped, clutching his chest as if he had been physically struck. "A blonde Addams? But how? My family hasn't seen a fair-haired child since Great-Uncle Caligula, and he was heavily inbred with the Swedish branch of the family!"
"It must be a curse," Morticia said, her eyes narrowing as she studied the baby's tuft of bright golden hair with morbid fascination. "A cruel, bright, sickeningly sunny curse upon our house. Look how it catches the light. It's absolutely repulsive."
"It is a tragedy," Gomez agreed passionately, leaning in to kiss Morticia's hand. "A dark, terrible burden we must bear. But we shall love her all the same, Tish. We shall raise her in the deepest shadows, teach her the beauty of the crypt, and perhaps, with enough time and misery, it will darken."
The protagonist wanted to scream again. She had survived a lifetime of abuse, died a violent death, endured the literal agony of a conscious reincarnation, and her new parents were currently having a minor crisis because she was a blonde.
It was utterly absurd. It was deeply, hilariously insane. And yet, beneath the bizarre, morbid dialogue, there was an undercurrent of something she had never experienced in her previous life: unconditional acceptance. Even as a "repulsive, sunny curse," Gomez had immediately declared they would love her. It was a terrifying, confusing paradox.
"We must give her a name," Morticia murmured, lifting the swaddled infant into her arms. The silk of her black dress felt wonderfully smooth against the baby's skin. "A name strong enough to counteract this... this golden affliction. Something dreary. Something bleak."
Yes, the protagonist thought desperately, locking her blurry eyes onto Morticia's face. Name me something dark. Name me something powerful. Name me Desdemona. Name me Lilith. Hell, name me Wednesday!
"She needs a name that speaks of tragedy," Gomez mused, pacing the floorboards, the heels of his shoes clicking sharply. "Something that evokes the chilling finality of the grave."
"No, mon cher," Morticia said softly, a strange, terrifyingly serene smile spreading across her lips. "Look at her. She is a creature of agonizing brightness. A glaring, inescapable light in our beautiful darkness. We must embrace the irony. We must name her for the very thing that torments us."
Gomez stopped pacing, his eyes widening in awe. "Tish... you are brilliant. A masterpiece of psychological torment."
No, the baby thought, her tiny fists clenching. No, wait. Don't do this.
Morticia gazed down at her golden-haired child, her dark eyes entirely devoid of warmth, yet entirely full of love.
"We shall name her," Morticia purred, the syllables rolling off her tongue like a velvet poison, "Sunshine."
The baby let out a wail of absolute, unadulterated despair.
Gomez laughed, a booming, joyous sound that echoed off the stone walls of the manor. "Listen to her cry, Tish! She hates it already! Oh, Sunshine Addams. It's delightfully cruel!"
Sunshine.
She had been reborn into the most famously dark and gothic family in fiction, retaining all the cynical, traumatized memories of a sixty-year-old abuse survivor, and she was stuck in the body of a golden-haired infant named Sunshine.
As Gomez leaned in to pepper Morticia's arm with passionate kisses, completely ignoring the fact that his newborn daughter was having a severe existential crisis, the newly christened Sunshine Addams closed her eyes.
She wished, with every fiber of her being, that she had been named Wednesday instead. It was going to be a very, very long childhood.