He was just a boy. A boy with lemon-colored hair. A boy who was hopelessly, desperately in love with Liesel Meminger, a boy who always tried to attain a kiss from her with no success. A boy who waded into a freezing river in the middle of winter to retrieve a book that was precious to her. A boy who painted himself black and became his hero Jessie Owens out on the racetrack without realizing how dangerous his actions were, too young for prejudices to have penetrated his heart.
She was just a girl. A Book Thief, to be more exact. A girl who secretly loved her blonde next-door neighbor, a girl who always declined his offers of kisses and claimed he was a pain in the neck. A girl with a secret, the secret of a person. A Jew. And that was perhaps the worst kind of secret to have in Nazi Germany. But there she was, carrying this secret around with her everywhere she went, feeling its heavy pull. And when the Secret left on a dark night in a flurry of tears, following in the footsteps of the grave mistake Hans Hubermann had made, she felt empty. It helped, of course, to share this unnatural, wrong lightness with Rudy.
So there she was, pouring out the remnants of a secret onto a boy was just glad they were back to normal again.
And there they were, racing down the busy streets, their breathless laughter filling the bleak German air, the prize for winning being either a kiss or the absence of one, which maybe wasn't a reward at all.
And there they were, playing soccer on Himmel Street, shouting at each other as they fought over possession of the ball, the cloud-covered German sun winking feebly at them.
And there they were, holding onto each other as their fathers left for war, and all they had left was each other.
And there they were, stealing the freely-given books from Frau Hermann, the stealing giving them a sense of power and control to hold onto as their worlds spun out of orbit, Rudy only in it for Liesel's company and the distant hope of a kiss, nothing more than a routine request at this point.
And there they were, trying to remain calm in the happily deep basement of a good German neighbor as the bomb sirens wailed and Liesel tried to keep the world together with the words.
And there they were, running away from home, but in reality only making a stranger's exit from this world more peaceful with the help of a teddy bear from Rudy's tool box.
And there they were, hurling insults at the Fuhrer with no one to hear them but each other, because maybe that was all that mattered.
And there they were, he offering her a kiss and she declining it with the expected, required "Saumensch," even though her heart was screaming at her to touch Rudy's lips with her own.
And there she was.
There she was, kneeling on the remains of a German's home, looking at the corpses of her father, mother, and best friend, because in the end the distinction between German and Jew hadn't been much at all: Both of them died when the bombs hit.
There she was, her tears making patterns in the dust on her cheeks, watching the last light leave Rudy Steiner's rubble-splattered face. Kissing him, in the cruel, ironic, twist of fate that meant that the first time those lips, those beautiful lips he'd been longing for since he first laid eyes on Liesel Meminger, met his own, he was unable to feel it.
Which meant that Liesel Meminger, who knew full well the effects of death on a person, wasn't kissing him for his benefit, but because she truly wanted to.
And maybe, just maybe, that was something Rudy Steiner would have been willing to die for.