Howdy, y'all!
Let it be said that, while fun, this was also vaguely painful for me to write. But heck, who am I kidding? I love messing with these two, and they give me a lot of material to play around with. Anyway, just another angsty Max and Liesel oneshot that takes place in the beginning of March, a couple weeks after she turned 17 and a couple months before he turns 29, so it's about five months after Liesel and Max reunited in October of 1945. Hopefully I didn't muck anything up too terribly in characterization, but rereading the book, I came across the little gem that Max learned how to play the accordion but stopped when he was nine, and I couldn't help myself. This got written. I hope y'all enjoy it as much as you seemed to enjoy the last one! As always, if you get a chance, any reviews are much appreciated, but just reading and enjoying the story is more than appreciated as well. If anyone has any ideas they'd like me to potentially write with these two as well, feel free to message me - I'm open to suggestions. Without further ado, enjoy the story! Catch y'all next time.
Christmas 1941.
Somehow, it always started then. A small pile of ice crystals sat in the center of the basement floor, surrounded by a dark haired Jew and a dark eyed book thief. A homemade snowstorm brought from the outside in to remind the hiding man what the snow felt like on his skin to celebrate the holiday. The simplicity was overwhelming.
The snowball fight that ensued was blurry to the young German girl, as was the creation of the snowman that sat in the center of the floor heartbeats later, surrounded by four people wrapped up in blankets and the hushed music of one accordion. Papa's fingers tapped out a clumsy Silent Night, the mistakes sounding oddly perfect. Around him, the gathered family smiled gently, their expression dragged from the depths of them by the humble beauty of the moment, watching as the snowman's body slowly began to slither across the floor in tendrils.
Liesel remembered that Christmas. Max's first and her favorite. She'd loved it until the repercussions had come knocking at their door. But in her memories, this moment at least remained golden.
Then, the bombs.
Behind Mama and Papa, the air sang and exploded into smoke, obscuring both of them. The accordion broke off with a sickened wheeze. Beside Liesel, Max faded quietly into the basement walls under the stinging judgment of the Nazi whip.
The smoke cleared. All that remained was the snowman, melting faster but still there in front of her. Still smiling until the stones that made its mouth fell away and hit the ground. Made of ash as Himmel Street burned around her.
Until she tore herself from the dream, Liesel screamed.
In her place in the Mayor's house, Liesel shot up. A shocked gasp fell from her lips. The air scraped in her lungs.
Across from the couch where she'd fallen asleep in the library again, the fire place glowed orange and red. Cold crept across the floor. It had nothing to do with the dying flames.
Her head in her hands, Liesel waited for a moment for someone to show up. She'd told Papa she was old enough to deal with her own nightmares, but she wanted to at least see him and help prove to herself that it wasn't true. She wanted to go downstairs to the fireplace and see Max. Hear Mama snoring. She could persuade herself to believe everything was alright then.
Her feet wouldn't move, and her Papa did not come.
Still half locked in her dream, she attempted to come up with reasons why. Papa was sleeping too heavily after a long day of work, and thought she didn't need his help anymore. Without her screaming awake at two in the morning, how was he to know? Mama had never been inclined to helping with the nightmares, and she slept through anything. And Max, he had his own demons to fight. That was it.
Except that she couldn't hear Mama's snoring, Papa was always there when she needed him, and Max was not in front of the fireplace.
Eventually, in the shock of knowing the truth and still not wanting to believe it, Liesel crawled from her bed and came up with her excuse. They were still in the basement of Himmel Street, where they had been left. I have to pull them out, she thought. They'll come back then.
Her feet hit the floor and crept towards the window. The door was locked at nights and she didn't have the key, but the window was easily manageable, and at seventeen, she was still slight enough to be able to slip through. Desperate fingers pawed at the clasp until it burst free and the window gave a slight puff of permission, unlocked and ready for escape.
Climbing onto the sill, she put her feet on the ledge below. The ice slipped under her feet, and she held on tight for a moment. Rudy hadn't been around in a while either, so she had to sneak out on her own, carefully. With a few seconds of effort, she managed, and her feet tapped softly into the snow that dusted the paved stones in front of Eight Grande Strasse.
The window still gaping behind her, her footprints crept down the drive to the ruins of 33 Himmel Street. She followed until she reached the scarred imprint of where the house used to stand.
She fell to her knees and dug.
If there was anything to be said for Dachau, it was that it was unforgettable.
As he dragged himself silently from the less than pleasant recollections, Max shuffled his way to the window. Outside, the stars blankly watched the snow dusted street. They'd been blank two years ago as well, unwavering and uncaring – impassive to his farewell, impassive to his capture, impassive to the silence that had suffocated the emaciated souls in Dachau. As brilliant as they were, Max found that the stars rarely seemed to care much for what happened to humans.
His fingers gripped the sill of the window.
It was cold out. Cold enough to clear his head, hopefully, so that he could maybe fall asleep for a few more moments without the ghost of his family chasing him to alertness. It was worth an attempt, at least. If nothing else, it would fill the hollow minutes until dawn.
Within a few minutes, a coat and scarf hung on his frame. The door shut quietly behind him.
Walking down the steps to the apartment, he followed his footsteps wherever they wished to take him. No sense of direction was necessary. He had noticed that he had a knack for finding a way back to the start eventually. Sometimes it took him a little while, but he always came full circle in the end.
When his mind coaxed him to Himmel Street, he didn't disagree. After all, where better to fight the memories of monsters than in the last place where humans were found? His shoes carved a signature into the ground as he stood and stared.
Rubble. Nothing around him. Heaven Street, fallen to pieces. Only Liesel had survived, because she had been writing, a phenomenon which he wondered at but did not question. It had been one of the few nuggets of good luck he'd found since the start of the Nazi reign, and there was no sense in degrading it.
His mind wandered down the street. He followed it until it stopped abruptly outside of where the Hubermanns had lived and died. The world around him was quiet. His misery contemplated the scene in silence.
The moon struggled to breathe through a cloud overhead. A shadow fell on the snow, and Max heard a loose digging noise. Someone was here.
Who else was mad enough to show up at a bombed out street in the dead of night? Who else still remembered this place and cared about it? Questions chased each other for an instant in his head as he walked forward. A particularly brave shard of moonlight revealed an obvious answer.
Liesel slumped on the ground. Her shoulders shivered. Her nightgown bled into the surrounding snow. Frozen fingers streaked the ground unresponsively.
"Liesel," he breathed, nightmare safely tucked away as he rushed forward. What was she thinking, sitting in the snow in just a nightgown? Didn't she remember the snowman, and what had happened to him? He reached out for her still skinny frame, fingers grazing her flesh lightly. She was the approximate temperature of ice. "Liesel, what on Earth are you doing out here?"
Her eyes scanned the darkness for a moment before settling an unfocused gaze on him. "…Out here?"
His stomach plummeted. "My God, Liesel," he whispered, leaning over to help her up. How long had she been sitting out here? "Come on. Come on." The soft rustle of his voice urged her to rise. "Let's get you warmed up." Crookedly, she stood, her hands frozen vices on his arm. The cold burned through his coat sleeve.
"How long have you been out here?" Concern laced the question.
Liesel's teeth chattered. She shook her head.
"Have to go back…My Mama and Papa. They're…in the b-basement…with M-max. It's not very w-warm in there. I have to g-get them so we can light a fire and w-warm them up." Feet stumbled and tripped in the snow. Words clenched into a fist and buried themselves in Max's stomach.
"Liesel, I'm here. I'm Max. They're not in the basement." The reminder attempted gentleness and yet still, the words slapped the girl in the frigid air. He watched her recoil.
"M-max?" Uncertainty dripped from the name. Eyebrows struggled to meet in confusion on her face. Her frozen mind refused to comprehend.
"I'm here, Liesel."
"W-where are M-mama and P-papa?" Syllables choked their way out of her throat. Max swallowed. Was there any way to tell her gently?
Her eyes met his. They read the sorrow there and crumpled soundlessly. "Nein," she whispered. Her knees buckled. Grief threw her to the snow.
Max caught her before she hit the ground. She shuddered under the weight of remembrance. Sliding one arm behind her head as support, the other went under her knees, and he carried her the rest of the way to his apartment.
In his arms, the bundle of limbs was so cold. She'd grown so big since they'd first met, since he'd last left.
She was still so small.
About fifteen minutes later, he'd arrived back at the apartment. After a minute or two spent struggling to unlock the door with a frozen girl in his arms, he'd finally managed and quietly nudged it open. He'd helped her over by the fireplace then, though she was stiff enough and shivering so harshly that he doubted she noticed. Drops of mist were frozen to her face. After a few moments, he realized they were tears.
Wordlessly, he stoked the fire until it sparked and bit at his fingertips. He took one of the spare blankets from upstairs and draped it carefully around her shoulders. Her nightgown was still frozen and damp from the snow, but there was little that he could do for that. Instead, he focused on what he could manage, wrapping her as tightly as he could in hopes that it would be enough.
Even with the heat of the fire, she still looked frozen, and not just from the cold. Empty eyes stared at the fire. The only life to be seen was in the flickering reflection of the flames. Cautiously, he sat beside her and draped one long arm around her shoulders, a half hug that let her decide if she wanted his help or not.
She leaned her head closer against his shoulder and he tightened his arm. The quiet breathed. Silence was inhaled and exhaled and seeped into their veins.
"Sometimes..." The word hung frozen and alone in the air. "Sometimes I can almost manage it. I can almost believe they are still alive, that they're just waiting for me to come back." A pause. "But they're never there."
"I'm sorry." The words fell like stones, echoes rippling from them. They were heavy, worthless. They were all he could offer.
A nod of understanding. "I know." The silence slithered back in and curled in front of the fireplace.
"I dream too. Like before." Words forced their way from Max's mouth without permission.
Time turned full circle. "What do you dream of?"
Max shrugged. "Leaving. Still. My mother." Of all people, leaving her was what haunted him most. Maybe it was because she had begged him to go. In his dreams, he could always see her so clearly as the camps consumed her and fed her to the flames of the war machine. Without fail, the image startled him awake.
"Max?" Liesel shifted, leaning closer. Her eyes flicked to him then returned to the fire.
"Yes?"
"What did your mother look like? You always talk about her, but you've never told me." Her voice was quiet in the night. Max stared at the fire. His heart clenched.
"She was beautiful. Her eyes were dark brown, but not like mine. Hers were…Like chocolate," he said, after a moment. "Dark pools of chocolate that hardened or melted depending on the time. Her hair was dark brown, and always in a messy bun at the back of her head, and her smile almost never showed her teeth but it always warmed her eyes." Faster now, the description came out. "She had laugh lines, and she looked very young. She loved all of us." An understatement. She'd died for him.
Liesel nodded.
"Sometimes," Max murmured, watching the flames, "I see her face, in my dreams. But it always goes away before I can come close enough to make her out. I often think that, if I could just see her clearly one more time, that it would make things better."
Silence answered him at first. Then, words.
"Ja," Liesel agreed. "I know. I feel the same way. Like maybe if I could hear Papa play the accordion sometimes, it would make them all seem a little less far away. But no one plays like he did. No one plays at all."
The sorrow in her words watched him. Under the accusing glare of the truth, he yielded. "I do," he murmured. "Not well, but I do." His fingers still couldn't remember the instrument he'd not played in almost twenty years well enough to do anything with it, and the memory ached too much of the father he'd never known, the mother he'd left behind, and the man who'd saved his life. He only managed a few notes at a time, most nights, if he managed any. They always sounded so mistaken, bittersweet under his fingers.
She turned to look at him in confusion. "Max?"
He nodded once to himself in confirmation. It was at least worth the attempt. "Hold on, Liesel," he said, letting go of her for a moment and feeling distinctly cold where her head had been on his shoulder. His feet padded quietly up the stairs. The accordion waited expectantly in the closet and held its breath.
As he lifted it, the instrument heaved. It did not want to breathe, not tonight. But he would not give it a choice.
In front of the fireplace, Liesel was still watching the stairs when he returned, instrument in hand. Her eyes held a question they did not ask. He shrugged. "After the war. The family that wound up with it knew us. They held onto it for several years so it could be returned, but I was the only one left, so they gave it to me." She nodded her understanding. He sat beside her again.
"I'm not much good," he warned. "I haven't really played in years."
She shrugged. Not very good was good enough. He started to play.
At first, his fingers stumbled on the keys, uncertain and sorrowful. They were unfamiliar, full of mistakes and memories and a distinct desire that they did not want to be here, playing this song tonight. He forced them to participate anyway. Eventually, though, they found shaky footing. A clumsy lullaby breathed to life, then an attempt at a simple traditional tune his mother had played a time or two, when they had been children. Memories danced in his eyes. The fireplace disappeared.
Something that loosely resembled a Blue Danube Waltz stumbled out of the accordion's lungs. His mother had always told him that it was his father's favorite. Dimly, he remembered seeing a different man try the tune once as well, when he'd been young – back then, the man had been just as clumsy on the keys, and Max had not known that he would one day have his life saved by the accordionist in the apartment. His fingers tripped and wept on the keys.
The last notes faded to silence after a few minutes of trying. Beside him, Liesel leaned her head on his shoulder again as he set the instrument and its dying sorrow to the side. His arm returned to its position around her shoulders. The crackle of the fire filled in the silence.
A single drop of wetness fell onto his shoulder. He looked over. Tears crawled down the book thief's face, and he held her tighter. When she buried her face into his shoulder, he didn't complain.
"I miss them so much, Max," she whispered.
"Ich weiß," he said simply, hugging her tighter. I know.