Autumn Heider

: ̗̀➛ Red.

"I'm just saying, you haven't really lived Porto Alegre if you haven't gone out to drink mate in the Gasômetro."

Some people are shaped by what they were given. Autumn Rynn Heider was shaped by what was taken away.

Born in Viamão to a mother who disappeared and a father who was there but never really present, she learned early that love is conditional and attention is currency you earn by being less of yourself. Her mother was Irish-American, fickle, the kind of woman known for what she wasn't rather than what she was. Her father built a small fortune through means that were dirty but not quite illegal, and when he died he left her money but no answers. The only thing her mother left was a name—Autumn—that made her a target for every kid in school who wanted to laugh at the gringa with the foreign name that didn't fit.

So she became Red instead. Red, who could rattle off the entire timeline of Operation Barbarossa before she could explain her own feelings. Red, who learned that if you talk about the mortality rate of the Soviet Second Shock Army, people stop asking why you're quiet about your childhood. Red, who found family in a black cat named Frida and home in the dates of every major offensive of the Second World War.

She studied History at UFRGS not because she wanted to teach it, but because she needed to understand it, needed to know that other people have survived worse, needed the weight of knowing that the world has ended before and rebuilt itself. She lives in Azenha with Sabaton playing loud enough to make the walls participate and Twenty One Pilots at 3am when things are going badly. She has two wardrobe modes: rock guitarist from 1987 or cottagecore baker, and they have never met and she sees no reason to introduce them.

She is the kind of person who gives the impression of being an open book right up until you realize you've been reading the wrong pages. She will talk for forty minutes about why Kursk was the actual turning point of the war, and you will not notice until later that she never once mentioned herself. She makes jokes about her own funeral before admitting she's struggling. She references Band of Brothers before saying she's havi