Alright, so this is an idea that wouldn't leave me alone and I was up until 3AM writing it. I guess I'm just not over Rudy Steiner yet. Anyway, thanks to Angel (angels entwined) for betaing this.
Rudy had always imagined the book thief's kiss to taste sweet, like strawberries, with a hint of Rosa Hubermann's soup on her lips.
But he couldn't have ever imagined that, on a quiet night, his world would shatter to bits around him.
They find him half-dead amidst the rubble; they will never know how he survived, perhaps Death forgot about him. He is scarred and broken, ripped open with the shards of his past life, but he is alive. It is both miraculous and devastating, Rudy's eyes blinking open, surrounded by his mutilated siblings.
(His picture is smeared on the front page of newspapers, the boy who woke up covered in ash and smeared with his sister's blood.
Poor, poor boy. He's so lucky. That's what they all say.
He doesn't feel lucky at all.)
There's a girl too, they say, and hope blooms in his chest that perhaps he's not the last Steiner child or maybe he's not motherless or—
Liesel. She is brought to the place where he sits, waiting for someone to take him away, with tear-streaked cheeks and an accordion in her hands. The man who carries her sets her down as if she's made of glass, which, by the way she shakes —moments away from crumbling— is a safe assumption.
She looks at him, but it's as if she's seeing right through him, unable to comprehend that he's alive too.
(It's also possible that Liesel has seen so many ghosts in her life that she can barely tell the difference anymore.)
After a long time she whispers, "Rudy," and he replies with, "I love you." It seems strange, but it seems that people slip through his fingers so easily and he can't afford to let the words go unsaid.
"I love you too."
He always imagined the way he'd feel when she'd speak the three words he most desired her to say, but this feels entirely different. He doesn't feel triumphant or even happy; he feels broken and he feels empty in a way that Liesel's words or kisses can never fill up.
Tears flood his eyes again because nothing goes the way it's meant to and mothers are supposed to die before their sons and children are supposed to get the chance to live and Heaven is not supposed to be bombed to bits.
Liesel grabs his hand and he's not sure if it's to make him feel better or because she feels like she needs something solid to hold onto because everything is disappearing and it hurts so much.
Her palm is sweaty and dirty, but her touch cools his skin.
"Kiss me, saukerl," she says, adding the insult as a bit of normalcy where everything else is wrong, "I need to know—"
Her thought is interrupted by his hands grabbing her face and their lips meeting clumsily because neither of them know how to kiss and they're just two children who may as well be adults.
The mayor and his wife take them away in their car, promising to take care of them until Rudy's father returns. The gray-haired woman cleans Rudy's wounds gently and he regrets ever wanting to steal from her. She tastes salty, of tears and ashes and it's not at all pleasant, but it's something; it reminds them that they're alive.
They sleep in the same bed that night, curled up next to each other in a futile attempt to ward off the inevitable demons that haunt them in their sleep. The mayor thinks of telling them that they must sleep apart, but he stops himself because they're just two kids, terrorized by the world they live in and the way that their bodies tremble in the warm air has him on the verge of tears.
Rudy had always imagined the book thief's kiss to be gentle, a butterfly's wing brushing against his lips, and he'd wrap his arms around her so she wouldn't fly away.
It wasn't supposed to happen this way.
The morning air is warm, but he is chilled to the bone when the Nazis come to take him away. He sits on the stairs with Liesel as his mother pleads with the men in uniform, "Please, please don't take away my baby."
Liesel is trying hard not to cry, but the tears come anyway. "What else can the Führer take away from me?" he thinks she says, in an almost inaudible whisper.
"I'm coming back soon," he assures her in an attempt to reassure himself. He is trying so hard to hold himself together, but he can feel himself at the edge of breaking.
"Come, boy, we're leaving now," one of the men calls to him.
"Bye, Liesel," he says, hoping to hold back the tears until he could get into the truck and face a wall and be safe.
He begins his walk toward the green vehicle, every step feeling like a huge leap toward the loss of his childhood, but a hand grabs his shoulder and spins him around. Liesel grabs the front of his uniform and crashes her lips to his forcefully.
"For good luck and because—" she trails off, unable to finish her sentence; she is the girl who holds words in her fingertips, but these words get lost along the way.
He barely has time to be shocked before one of the men in uniform grabs him by his arm and drags him away.
He returns years later, his lips chapped from the heil hitlering. He returns to honor the dead.
He finds her there, pale and broken; a basement had collapsed on her, but they'd tried to make her look presentable in that box, surrounded by flowers and holding a book in her hands.
He contemplated grabbing the book and saving it, but if his training had taught him anything at all, it was to be unselfish. She deserved, at least, to be buried with the thing that she loved most. The thought stung; he always wished that the thing she'd love most would be him, but he let her go.
He stands there, surrounded by boxes full of his brothers and sisters, mother, and the girl he loves, and can't help but feel that he deserves to be in one of them.
Rudy had always imagined the book thief's kiss to be warm, as full of fire as the girl was, so wonderfully alive.
In his worst nightmares, he couldn't have imagined that her lips could be so cold.
The world shakes so suddenly, a crash waking the whole street up from their dreams and their nightmares. They are all so scared, but, in a worker ant style, they made their way to the shelter, children's screams barely audible over the sound of the bombers coming closer.
There are only three missing that night, but they are three whose absence from the shelter do not go unnoticed.
When the doors shut is when Rudy begins to scream.
"Liesel! No, not Liesel!" He is frantic, trying to run to the door, to scream her name into the night, but his mother pulls him back.
"She'll be okay, Rudy," his mother says gently.
Mothers are not always right.
Two bodies are found in the debris that morning, a wardrobe-shaped woman and her husband. A third is dug out from beneath a collapsed basement.
It makes the most sense, of all the stories that wondering minds have concocted, that the shaking of the ground caused the basement's entrance to collapse with Liesel still inside and the Hubermanns couldn't leave their daughter to protect themselves; it's in the unwritten parental code that every good parent follows. Of course, that's only an educated guess; only God and Death know the real story.
Liesel would be so proud, having stories made up about her.
She is placed in the street, next to her parents, while arrangements are made for her body. Rudy kneels next to her, his sobs piercing the air.
"Why you, Liesel? Why not me? I love you, Liesel. Please come back."
He leans forward and kisses her gently. Her lips are hard and cold, lifeless, and his sobs grow harder as he collapses onto her still body. He holds his ear to her chest, hoping that, maybe, just maybe, he'll hear her heartbeat or feel her breathing, but the world stands still.
Every night the kiss thief lies awake, haunted by a question that would never be answered.
If their roles had been reversed and if he was the corpse surrounded by the ruins of Heaven, would she have kissed him too?
Rudy had always imagined the book thief's kiss, but when did he ever get what he wanted?
The book thief's kiss came long after he'd stopped imagining anything and she kissed his shell as if she could bring life to it.
Death was somewhat glad that Rudy's soul was already tucked away because, if he knew one thing for certain, it was that Rudy Steiner could not handle being the cause of her tears.