Difference between revisions of "Alwin Heidrich"

Revision as of 08:14, 17 October 2015

January 1900

It was an idyllic day for a birth. A wash of white covered the land. Flat fields transformed into rolling hills as the blanketing snow covered everything equally. A series of mounded homes tucked tightly together formed one particular homestead, the mill no longer churning for the ice choking up its cogs seasonally.

It looked like a black and white photo, the landscape was so serene.

Alwin Maddox Heidrich was born on one especially still winter day. His cries pierced the silence, dislodging a tiny flurry of snow from the tree outside what would soon be his room’s window view. An exhausted but joyful mother held him close. A plump midwife busied herself with cleaning. A proud father looked upon his small family with a smile. The crackling fire on one wall offered light and heat and dancing joy to everyone’s minds. Alwin was born to nothing less than a loving home.

February 1910

Winter was his favorite time of the year. It was quiet and perfect and of course his birthday fell in the winter months. He was ten years old and knew that everything was right in the world. His family had grown to give him two younger brothers and two little sisters, one too small to really enjoy, but he felt proud of his charges regardless of their ages. He was the oldest and it fell upon him to complete his studies in a timely manner and then help to oversee theirs.

Most were still too young to begin their magical practices, but he’d already begun his which gave him one more item to boast about. Of course, no one boasted in his family, they only stood a little taller, like his papa had when Lilly had been born. He was intent on making his father proud with his studies, just as little Lilly had with simply being alive.

March 1920

He was intent on making his father proud.

Defending his home would make him proud, but did the dead see their family as clearly as the living? A war had gripped the nation and somehow wizarding folk saw it necessary to include themselves in it.

He understood it now, but at the time it was through a teenager’s eyes that he watched his father go off to fight. Alwin hadn’t been raised to look down his nose at anyone. They were pureblood but they had never interacted solely with other purebloods. The Heidrich family cherished their quiet life and Alwin grew up to believe that a person’s home was their castle and that joy came in sharing with those around you. He understood the difference early on between wizarding folk and non’, of course, because their closest neighbors were muggles. When the Möller family visited, care was taken in hiding anything that might be strange to them, and it went without saying that magic wasn’t used around them. Yet those less fortunate folks, those muggles were friends, neighbors, fellow Germans just trying to live their life and feed their families.

Alwin hadn’t attended public or private school, so he never developed a learned hatred for one group over another. He only vaguely knew that defense of one’s lifestyle was important; taking pride in one’s accomplishments was only natural as long as it didn’t go to the head; and that enjoying one’s freedoms was self-evident.

None of those axioms helped him to understand why his father had died. He had been helping a people that might not have been able to help themselves. He had been defending his homeland from a threat that seemed to spawn from those same people. Somehow he’d been cut down by a [i]wizarding[/i] group that Alwin couldn’t relate to; a group spouting nonsense about muggle-dirt and wizard superiority.

That war was over, but a new threat lingered on. It was new to Alwin. It was the threat of irrational beings.

He would make his father proud, even if he had to sever the irrational limb from its body. Somehow, he would make his father proud.

January 1930

Nothing was easy or sweet any longer.

Illogical actions seemed like a sickness, they were so prevalent. Muggle against muggle. Wizard against wizard. Maybe that was how it needed to be, but it wasn’t as clean cut as that. Most wizards that he’d met with were developing a special strain of the virus. Muggles had their own version it seemed. Hatred ran rampant in some families, blaming all of life’s ills on one group or another; usually Pures against Halves against the newly formed. While Alwin’s muggle friends, what few there were anymore, were being crushed under the weight of a nation’s decisions and a world’s sentencing. No one seemed to be able to think rationally any longer.

Alwin, despite everything, had worked to strengthen his understanding of the world through education. He was a self-taught man; an ability learned from his youth spent with all manner of tutors. He’d grabbed at knowledge as a starving fellow might, trying to find something of use to him, trying to find a reason for people’s propensity to hate. Nothing truly helped.

Hundreds of theories, thousands of cases where human was pitted against human, every example one might wish for to conclude that a particular group was past the point of help, but nothing suggested a fix.

The winter chill seeped into his bones. It was icy and dry, all liquids unable to escape transformation into their crystalline form. It was calming, much more so than the mood of his people, both sides – muggle and wizard.

Alwin was at a loss. He couldn’t change a thing… not on his own.

Spring 1940

It wasn’t the scene that he’d expected that morning, as he stared out the paned window, but it wasn’t surprising either.

He enjoyed the family home. He visited it as often as he could. His family, less a father and a brother due to strife that couldn’t be squashed in time, had a refuge to seek when times got hard. Alwin needed just such a retreat.

The German people, nay Europeans in general, were clashing again. Alwin’s ‘home’ had always included a special place for his German neighbors, so when word reached him that the Germans were uniting he’d smiled a little smile. His neighbors had found something, someone to rally behind. Alwin had at first thought such a thing would be good, that maybe if the muggles could find their strength then the wizarding community wouldn’t have to involve themselves in thoughts of control or aid or…

Unfortunately, the figure they’d chosen seemed to grow less rational by the day.

Alwin’s heart sank as he peered out the window.

Troops of men, clad in uniform, marched just across a field. The family home was well off the beaten track, no major thoroughfares for miles to the east and the west. It meant that someone had gotten misdirected. It meant that someone had probably gotten orders to move north…

Denmark was less than twelve hours from his home by foot. The muggles, their new leader, were pushing for more.

Alwin was losing his home; maybe not the homestead that he’d grown up in, and maybe not to the troops marching past it, but in a grander sense he was losing his home to. Drastic decisions, irrational minds and power-hungry fools were taking it all from him.

Could he even hope to make a difference? Could he even hope that the men he’d begun to follow, to work beside, to trust in, would be able to make a difference?

He didn’t know.