AN: There are a lot of stories where Rudy lives alongside Liesel. Thought I'd twist the usual twist and make it angstier. Hope you like it! As always, I own nothing.

They disinterred the girl and a book.

Her knuckles were white from death, though probably not much different before a hunk of cement brought her ears to her heart to hear the dying beats; she clutched the book so tightly. They could but couldn't pry it from her cold hands.

She was almost buried with it.

Rudy almost didn't attend the funeral. He had already left daisies atop his sisters' folded hands and bumped into Tommy's casket as he stared at the untwitching face for too long. But here he stands now, before Liesel Meminger and her coffin, so plain it's ugly, under an off-white crumpled paper sky.

He assumed she'd never die, not even when she was so old her skin cracked into pale leather. He thinks of her hiding somewhere with an empire of books, cackling and reading and rereading and never getting caught for her thefts, and his smile is completely out of place at the funeral.

It falters when he sees the book, stark black against her faded dress.

His mama always warned him he was too curious. She's dead now. They all are.

As he slides the book out from under her crossed wrists, Rudy remembers that he called the corpse a book thief once.

Considering the unpleasantness of their job, the men who rescued him had quite the sense of humor. They had just lined up the bodies of his family and neighbors when one of them noticed the partially buried yet otherwise miraculously unharmed outhouse and thought aloud, "If there is a God, someone had to take a piss right before all of this."

Rudy was unconscious when they hauled him out, awaking to a new, alarming world as they set him down away from most of the rubble. The gravel of his house dug into his back.

The LSE men were crowing at his good fortune. The only survivor of Himmel Street, saved by fate and nature, was too alive to feel embarrassed but too bleary and confused to laugh with them.

"To hell with air raid shelters; we're installing air raid shithouses!"

"You must be very relieved, my boy," quipped another, who then quieted with the rest of the crew as the boy began to cry out for his mama.

It was hard to believe that his life could be laid out on the sidewalk, tallest to shortest. At the end of the lineup was Bettina, whose warmth Rudy had left only minutes ago. He could have perished beside her. She died alone under their shared blanket.

The Hubermanns' fosterchild shared a similar fate as everyone else. It was startling because she was so different. Rudy overheard a policeman say the girl would have died anywhere in the house. Their basement simply wasn't deep enough to make a difference.

Wrapped in an unfamiliar blanket, Rudy sat among the dead because he was supposed to be with them, anyway, and thought only of fallen dominoes. He screwed his eyes shut from the destruction, wishing he could do the same for his still-ringing ears.

He received a telegram not long after the bombing. He went outside since the police station was too busy, too crowded - not at all an adequate place to read.

The swastika stamped on the paper was warning enough. The black-ink eagle pecked at his fingers.

"Steiner family," it began, and Rudy started to snort derisively but read on, "it is our sad obligation to report…"

He ripped the letter in half, into quarters, into eighths, and curled up on a bench inside and slept. He vaguely recalled wanting to kill the Führer, and that had been when his papa was drafted, not shot somewhere in Russia.

In that low basement of hers, while aircraft wove through storm clouds carrying her demise, she must have collected her thoughts and spilled them onto paper; the book is a journal.

Ash has stained the pages and the spine is bent but there's no blood. Her handwriting is spry and lovely. Her words are remarkable.

She wrote about him. And her papa and her mama. And Max, the Jew they kept hidden as the world hid the rest of them. She wrote about being unable to write so many years ago when Rudy first met her.

Her journal is a relic and he ages with it, growing older from her as he reads it.

They rename Himmel Street. It's still the poor part of Molching but then, all of Germany seems poor these days.

The kids that play soccer on the road don't know about the girl who caught a ball that would have meant Rudy's first kiss had it hit the wall between two cans, who ran into a boy twice her size to save a life in her basement. They run, oblivious, down the same street where Rudy had to tackle her to restrain her from following the herded Jews, their tangled limbs the closest they'd ever come to what Rudy didn't know he wanted until much later. The small hands that furtively reach for things they can't afford have never held candy sticky with someone else's spit.

As far as Rudy is concerned, they don't know anything, really. They know hunger and poverty, but not war and genocide. Not like she did.

They know that the fifteen-year-old boy in their orphanage is "unaccompanied", no other siblings as lucky as he to have survived the bombing, the death camps, the war, Europe. They even know that he ran, victorious, through an invisible tape with moonlight and charcoal on his skin - though he did brag about that a lot afterward.

Still, he can't hate them. They have Bettina's laugh and Emma's little kid ears and Anna-Marie's runny nose and Karin's freckles and Kurt's cigarette teeth.

But it's as though he's the only one who remembers. Maybe her journal is her last memory, her legacy, her own Jesse Owens Incident - and he has it.

He also has nightmares, of course. He survived his entire street being obliterated in a war suddenly too close to home.

When he springs from his cot, he can still feel cold corpse arms embracing him too tightly from behind, and he throws his sheet aside and swings his legs off the side of the cot as if he's going to escape, to run run run away so his papa can bring him back home.

He wakes the other orphans but they're too tired to get upset when they've already cried for their families and friends and futures. All of the other cots rustle as they turn away from him.

"Do I know you?" a man asks one day. He's wearing an old coat over a pressed shirt. There are still ripped stitches of an earlier time outlining something like half a star.

Rudy frowns and shrugs but in his mind he is reciting the lines from a book he's forced himself to remember.

He would move on but the man says, "I'm sorry, it's just… your hair." He chuckles softly to himself. "It's the color-"

"-of lemons, ja. And yours is made of feathers."

Max's eyes widen and he's about to grin, he's so close to looking happy, until he asks about her.

Shaking his head, Rudy has never felt a more powerful fist connecting with his stomach as Max's face fumbles, folds, falls. He wishes he'd actually been punched but the Jewish fist fighter's hands remain at his sides.

The author of their eminent descriptions would volunteer herself.

Sonja is plump and dark-haired with pale green eyes. She's nothing like her and that's the point.

He kind of likes her company -

"Well, well, Rudy. I didn't know you kept a diary."

- until something like that happens.

After she's adopted by her grandparents and moves to whatever's left of München, his excuses for not answering any of her letters are that he can't write like the book thief could and that ink and stamps are expensive, anyway.

The head mistress of the orphanage doesn't look the other way when Rudy begins to leave every other afternoon. She watches him until he has passed the curb, making sure he doesn't go into the pub and brothel next door. Germany doesn't need any more alcoholics, let alone children growing up too fast. After that, as long as he's finished chores, she doesn't care. She turns her attention back to the younger ones.

She doesn't know he's visiting a Jude but she's not supposed to mind anymore, anyway.

"You know you're welcome to just stay here," Max says one late afternoon, after work. "I could be like an older brother."

Rudy shrugs the man's hand off his shoulder. "I have an older brother."

Max's expression darkens. "No, you had one. You had a family. So did I. Where are they, Rudy?"

The boy looks away but he doesn't flinch. "Can I just keep something here? It's not much."

His next trip out of the orphanage, he takes her book. It's all he had the night his town blew up, and it's all he has now.

The head mistress sees Max walk with him back to his apartment, and her mouth becomes a wisp.

Rudy starts leaving in the morning, every day. One day he just doesn't come back.

"You should buy other books, Rudy."

"In this economy?"

Max sighs.

Years after she wrote them, Rudy is still dwelling on her words.

"I hope you're happy, Saumensch." His tongue is bloated and the beer in the bottle on the coffee table is frustratingly depleting. Lines illustrating the toolbox and the teddy bear burn across his eyes. He'd wanted to be a thief, too. He comforted a dying American pilot, instead.

Rudy turns another page, and when it tears, just a little, he can't find the will to stop crying.

The couch dips next to him. He says, "I didn't kiss her."

"Who, Sonja?" Max asks, taking the book from him gently, closing it firmly. He frowns at the beer and caps it.

"No. Well, yes." He drags his wrist across his nose. "But I didn't kiss her either. I couldn't, Max. Not even when she was dead and I knew I'd never see her again."

Those damp, perfect eyes lurch towards Max. For a moment, he, with his dark hazel eyes, is inferior in the blond crosshairs of Aryan blue and almost cowers back into his barracks, but that memory is hastily shaken off.

"She left quite an impression, didn't she." Max flips the book in his hands, weighs the words inside it. "I miss her, too." He considers something. "I've always wondered: how do you have this?"

Rudy huffs a laugh as he admits, "I saw it at the funeral and just took it. Nobody left me anything else."

"I'm not angry that you did, I was just curious. This thing's worn to shit."

"Made more use of it than she would've." He shrugs a shoulder, counting the folded corners. One of them saves the page where she tried to explain both the dread and the obligation to imagine him naked. "Someone had to read it."

"I wrote her stories, you know," Max tells him.

"They must not have been very good if she never told me about them."

Max chuckles too loudly and shakes his head like there's a secret involved. "She told me a lot about you."

"I know." His mouth contorts in misery. "How do I let go of her?"

Hesitating, Max hands the journal back to Rudy.

The Amper River is freezing but that didn't stop him when he was fourteen and in love with a living girl.

"Liesel." The wind cuts through him, slashes him into pieces. "You forgot something." Knowing she would know he took it, he chastely kisses the cover and smiles as he thinks of her reply:

Give it back, Saukerl.

The book looks so oddly natural bobbing along the churning dark waves.

The man with lemon hair and safe blue eyes doesn't move to swim after it; he's returning it to its thief.