Alternate ending + never meeting Luther
Send ‘Alternate ending’ for a drabble on how Hedwig would be different if something in her past was altered.
Hansel was disappointed–but not surprised–to come home from his now bi-daily sunbathing with nothing more exciting to commit to his memory than the observation that his side of the Wall had started to develop a new crack. He needed to get out of Berlin.
And where did that leave him?
Trapped. Expelled. Penniless. Still sleeping with mom… oy.
The next year, his wish came true. The Berlin Wall came down. And his dreams of Western exploration came one step closer to being realized.
By some miracle, his partial degree allowed him to get into an educational program on the West side, allowing him to complete his doctorate and move pretty immediately into a teaching position.
At 27, he felt like he was finally an American teenager with his first real taste of independence. And while there had been some American culture broadcast on the American Forces stations, supplemented by their British counterparts, there was still so much to catch up on.
For her own part, Hansel’s mother had been evacuated the previous year.
“You understand, Hansel,” she said, stacking her hands on top of each other by her coffee mug. “There’s just not much opportunity for a woman of my age to get out. You’re still young; you’ve got your whole life ahead of you to figure a way out of here.”
His face might have been sculpted by one of her students, it was so still.
Hedwig Schmidt sighed, placing her hands on her only child’s shoulders.
“Hansel. To walk away, you’ve got to leave something behind.”
What was left unspoken was that she had made the conscious decision to leave behind him.
It took a self discipline that most things in his life up until this point really hadn’t, but soon enough, Hansel was able to buy his own ticket to England–and one for the man that he had been seeing since Germany’s reunification.
From there, Hansel went by himself to New York, overstayed his visa, and started a mildly successful band. It wasn’t much– it certainly wasn’t enough to live on without being augmented with various odd jobs–but it was his.
[ Funnily enough, I actually based an entire verse around this premise and then later moved that verse over here (where it’s the main.) Hedwig meeting Luther is such a formative part of her backstory, it’s fascinating to me to see what might have happened had she not met him. Or had he not proposed when he did.
Additional fact for this verse: this Hansel is still genderqueer, but presents more ‘male-aligned as a default’ than Hedwig’s ‘female-aligned as default’ ]
