A/N: Hey guys. I don't know why I wrote this. It is by far the darkest chapter I have written, and I'm so sorry for that. I really am. But as soon as I thought of it months ago, I couldn't get it out of my head, so brace yourselves, it's going to dig deep.

If I'm honest, I dont really know what qualifies for a trigger warning, but there will be mild suicidal themes in this chapter, so if you are sensitive to that kind of thing, please don't feel you have to read it. Again, I'm very very sorry.

Please review, and enjoy (if you can).

If she ever asks again, he'll tell her he slipped.

He knows it's a lie.

She knows it's a lie.

But it's what they tell themselves.

*One Small, Sad Fact*

Rudy Steiner sat at the edge of the world,

His feet dangling.

Soft, warm sunlight leaked from behind ash stained clouds, dripping across his face and illuminating his yellow hair. A light breeze brushed past him every now and then, muttering polite, tuneless excuses as it passed him and on through the trees. The abstract contortions of the rippling water beneath his feet clapped and chattered as it rushed onward towards the afternoon light.

He sat on the edge of path, in a pool of scattered dust and wandering footprints from long ago, under a structure of familiar, rusted metal. It was comforting, almost: how well he knew this place. A river, a bridge, a boy. Everything was how it should be.

Except those last words were wrong.

The taste of forced normality was cold and dusty in his mouth, and every now and then, he would try to spit it out into the river and expel it from his system. But it stayed. Because despite the fact that everything had changed, this place remained exactly how it was before. It still moved onward, bubbling, singing, breathing, not worrying itself with the troubles of humans. The world kept turning, smiling, throwing a courteous heil or two to anyone who paid generously enough. The boy was left behind crying out for his family in a mountain of broken home. Small, and alone.

And very, very sad.

It was the only word that he could really think of. If it were Liesel, she could have conjured up a thousand different extraordinary, beautiful words that he could have nurtured on his tongue, spat out to those who kept fawning over him in sympathetic ignorance. Heartbroken, devastated, broken: the possibilities were endless. But the only word that seemed to make any sense, that he could consciously describe himself as, was sad.

A small, lonely, childish word. Like him.

*Duden Dictionary Definition*

Sad

adjective

A feeling of deep sorrow; unhappiness

See also: Rudy Steiner

Not that Liesel could have produced the words. The Book Thief hadn't spoken for days.

The funeral had ended not too long ago. Not that he really knew for certain: it seemed like it was drawing to a close when he began to walk away. He had left them sleeping under the earth; under halos of paper white flowers; under the steady grey flow of soft, useless words that dripped from the priest's mouth. His whole family were sleeping: closed eyes and silent hearts and lemon yellow hair. Locked in a wooden box like a treasure chest.

His fingers had traced their names stamped into the stone, trying to grasp the fact that these neat ridges and smooth curves had once made letters; had once made names. Now they were just words.

*Another Small, Sad Fact*

I stood beside the boy, in that graveyard.

I watched him leave a kiss in his mother's cold hand.

Something to remind her of her son,

Still living and breathing.

And wishing he wasn't.

Oh Rudy.

Somewhere else, there was a girl made of ice. Sculpted from ash-stained porcelain; brown eyes completely rusted at the edges; slowly crumbling. She stood not too far from the edge of the world herself, gazing down at where her second parents lay. She dripped tears and snow. Ash stained her hair and embedded in her fingers.

He could remember warmth. He could remember dust. Between the hazy, tear-stained, ash-stained dreams that he would break out of in a trembling sweat, he could remember her hands, those sweet, blistered fingers reaching up to touch his face, stroke his hair, run across his lips, until sleep dragged him away again. Only when he awoke some time before dawn did he realise that she had been there beside him the whole night, breathing, gasping, silently weeping as another receding nightmare left its bite. He did not know at what point she had appeared in his room, nor if he had actually noticed that she had slid under his duvet, but either way, it didn't really matter.

Somewhere far, far away, another Rudy would have been positively thrilled to find Liesel in his bed, but for some reason, it made him want to cry. He remembered tracing along her curled form with his eyes, realising how small she was - little more than a dusty collection of bones and skin and a beating heart. He remembered watching her wake up: the emptiness of her eyes as they opened, the last rain of the dream she had been drowning in washing away. He watched the recollection catch up with her, clawing up her arms, tightening around her throat. He remembered dragging her closer, or dragging himself closer - he wasn't quite sure - and burying his face in her shoulder, in an attempt to blind himself from the next few hours that loomed up before him.

And there he stayed, clinging tightly onto her, until her ribs pressed patterns into his chest, until the sunlight leaked across the floor. Then, as silently as she came, she was gone again. There was dust on the pillow where she had slept.

They came for him not long after. The formal attire they clothed him in was so large that he practically drowned in it, the sleeves hanging off his wrists. He wasn't entirely sure who the clothing belonged to, nor why there was a strange emptiness to Frau Hermann's pale eyes as she handed it over, but he did not question.

He supposed they looked quite pathetic: two bony teenagers with dirt in their hair and bruises painted on their skin in elegant, over-sized mourning clothes. The dress Liesel wore reached past her grubby knees, and she had pushed her sleeves up to her elbows, a habit she had never really grown out of - what with petty crimes and fierce games of football in the street. He tried not to think about the fact that all this had existed only a few days ago, before it began raining bombs. Before I paid a visit.

In fact, he tried not to think at all. Thinking was bad. Thinking would make him remember. Remembering would make him see them. And that would leave him crying, and wailing, and wanting them back, because he missed them so goddamn much.

And so, he walked away. Before the empty words left their bite. Before the silence closed around his heart. Before he could think to stay.

It was a familiar road he followed, worn hard by the soles of their boots. It didn't even occur to him: as the sound of chattering water blossomed in the air, as the ground began to lean forward in its eagerness to meet the river. It was almost instinctual, if his instincts hadn't been left rotting in the snowy bones of his home. No change had marked it. If he kept walking, maybe he could pretend that nothing had happened. That if he turned around and walked home, there would be a home to walk to: a mother to kiss his forehead and ask him where the hell he'd been all day, sisters to hang off his limbs and try to tie scraps of ribbon into his hair, and a brother to laugh while he suffered sullenly at their hands.

He knew it was a lie.

But that's what he told himself.

Now he was here, sat on the edge of his childhood, where many kisses were forgotten or caught, and the ground had been beaten by their running feet.

The hours had slipped by slowly, drifting along with the river. Not that he would have noticed. Time seemed to sit beside him, watching the world walk by. He wished it would stop and take him with it.

Deep down in his belly, there was grief: raw and aching and biting and oh, it hurt. It really, really hurt. Slowly unfurling in his veins like a drop of ink in water, creeping past the walls of rubble that the shock had built up. But they were slipping away. Everything was slipping away. And he let it, because he didn't know what else he could do.

He would weep, but his eyes stayed painfully empty. He wanted to weep, because if he wept, he could have done with it and move on. But the tears wouldn't come. And so he stayed, the poisonous tears caught somewhere beneath his ribs, gradually corroding him. Why did it hurt so much? He needed his mother. She always seemed to make the pain go away. He needed her to comfort him, and tell him he would be fine - like when his father had gone to fight. Like when he was younger and had scraped his knee until it bled. She would smile, and tell him to be brave. Only a few years later, she stopped smiling. Being brave became less of a request, more of a requirement.

It wasn't really a word he knew the meaning of any more. It used to mean not crying when you fell over, or when someone stole your football. As he grew older, brave was jumping into icy rivers. Brave meant stealing apples, stealing books, and hoping one day to steal a kiss. But then they snatched his father, in the name of bravery. And then brave was dying for a corrupt cause. Brave was another piece of propaganda.

It was around that point that Rudy Steiner had decided he didn't want to be brave. Brave could go fuck itself.

Now it was just another empty word, buried beneath the earth with his mother, and his siblings. Several words had stopped meaning anything: their significance slipping away like the fleeting crescent smiles in the river below him. He didn't know what home meant anymore. It tasted almost familiar, but cold in his throat. He looked down at the water. The water looked back. He spat the word into its face, sending it scattering across the fragmented surface.

*Did It Care?*

No.

It moved on regardless.

And he envied it.

He wondered if he'd slip.

Everything else had: the words, the bones of his home, the life he used to know, sliding through his fingers like the rushing water beneath him. And doubtless, the faces and voices of his family would too, their features carved in smoke, the sounds and words dimming and dissolving. He didn't want to lose them, but they had already been lost days ago, carried off with the fragile, burning snow. Carried away in my cold arms.

His eyes fell to the river again. The bridge sat rigid just under three metres above the water, and he knew from experience that it ran deep at the centre. He could fall, let the water take him with it, until he all he breathed was water. He could sleep, without the nightmares, without the acidic grief, and never forget the sound of his sisters' laughter. The world would move on, and the boy would move on with it.

He wasn't afraid. He wasn't afraid. Maybe it was the numbness that had spread through his veins. Maybe he was fearless. Maybe he was brave like his mother told him to be. He didn't know anymore. It hurt to think now. It hurt very much.

There was no fear anymore. Jesse Owens didn't know the meaning of fear.

Only sadness.

The boy pushed himself to his feet, his fingers digging into the metal structure on either side of him. The sunlight clung to his lemon hair, sliding down his face. He was trembling, but he didn't know why.

I would like to have said that his family stood with him on that bridge. I really would. But sadly, it doesn't work like that. So I stood beside him instead. I watched him as his hand clenched around the bridge's familiar bones, then loosened. He did not take a last glance around, like so many souls I knew. Maybe if he had, he would have heard his name. But he didn't.

*One Small, Sad Fact*

I watched as Rudy Steiner stood at the edge of the world.

And I watched him fall off.

It was strange, when he thought about it. The water moved like the flicker of grey ribbon on the surface, chattering and clapping in an enthusiastic, tuneless cacophony. But underneath, it was still, and silent: painfully, beautifully silent. He was blinded from the sounds and smiles of the world as the river swallowed him whole like a penny sweet. Not for the first time.

It was familiar. An odd mix of fish in air and bird in water. Wrapped in winter: a gown of ice and snow. On a treasure hunt. Or a game of hide and seek. Whatever you wanted to call it. Only this time, there was nothing to find. No book. No kiss. No words.

His overly large clothes bloomed and unfurled about him, pulling him downward with soft, heavy fingers. Sunlight reached through the thick layers of river, striking his skin until it glowed pale blue. His vision was blurred, every sharp edge softened till blunt, nearly non existent. He couldn't think straight. The words - those damn words - floated through his head, once empty and painful, now nonsensical. He wondered if he'd ever work out their meaning; they slid from his lips in pretty, spherical beads that rose up in the water before him, but they made no more sense now than they did before.

Sad, brave, home, Himmel, kiss, family, words. They slipped away from him, drifting out of his reach, and he let them. Words were not, and would never be, his strong point.

Every inch of him was bitten with cold, but he couldn't feel a thing. The river's fingers scraped down his throat, filling his belly, his chest, his eyes. His lungs ached with the struggle for oxygen, grasping at the sunlight like an anchor. An unfortunate fact of life is that anchors always seem to sink. Ironic, when you think about it.

Though his chest was cracking like glass, and his ribs were tangled in his stomach, he couldn't feel it. There was only the slow, distorted movement of his limbs, and the sharp taste of deja vu on his tongue. Somewhere far, far away was the grief, still present, still heartbreaking, still scratching at his insides. Somewhere further away was his mother, eyes closed, heart shut, with Himmel Street snow in her still lungs. And a kiss from her son in her left hand.

His eyes grew heavy. It would be like falling asleep. He hadn't slept in days: the thought was sweet and soothed the ache in his chest a little. He couldn't feel his hands anymore. He couldn't feel anything really. He wasn't sure if that was good or bad, but either way he didn't care. He just wanted to sleep.

It would have been too easy right then. Another Steiner to carry away, another colour to collect. Lemon yellow - never had such a bright, childish colour been so bitter. His soul was there for me to take, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I would have to. He was slipping away, slowly, so slowly.

And so I reached out for him.

And I would have taken him.

If someone else hadn't beaten me to it.

Apparently, books aren't the only thing she steals.

The river erupted in a burst of silver as the glass surface shattered. It jolted Rudy out of his slumber, only just, as his eyes scoured the blurry, grey oblivion for the intruder. Small, blistered fingers reached out and caught his arm, the collar of his shirt, anywhere they could reach, and clutched at him. He knew those hands. Those sweet, wonderful hands.

She was here. His Book Thief. His glorious, glorious Liesel Meminger.

Her fingers were insistent, gripping him with surprising strength for a collection of bones. She tugged at him, trying to drag him away. Her eyes were wide in panic, her feet kicked frantically to try and keep herself up under his weight.

Shit. She can't swim.

The last scraps of oxygen clung to the inside of his throat, and he suddenly became acutely aware of the lack of air. With what little strength remained stuck to his limbs, he caught her around her waist and made for the sunlight that glared tauntingly down at them. His lungs were twisting and contorting, standing on their final arteries, and he thought he was going to burst. The water was leaking through his teeth. He could not survive much longer. She was fighting to pull him up to the surface, and he kicked upward with his last breath.

The surface shattered once again as two youths burst up from the arms of the river, desperately drinking in the oxygen, their throats burning and fragmented with water. From edge to edge of his eyelids was flooded with light spilling across the sky. He could hear himself gasping for breath: the heavy, wincing cries that issued from the beneath his damp ribs. His chest rattled and heaved; he dripped with October.

It took him a moment to remember that his right hand was still stuck by the fingernails to Liesel's arm. She and the river seemed to be wrestling, and the river was winning. She fought violently to stay above the crowd of benignly jabbering smiles that hit her in waves, her parted lips only just out of their reach. Her hands were still knotted in his shirt collar, and unlikely ever to loosen.

He pushed her through the water towards the shore, only just managing to keep them both up. He kicked off his heavy, dragging shoes, making a mental note to apologise to Frau Hermann later. His toes brushed soft, watery earth; he forced his way forward until his feet sank into the riverbed. Liesel also seemed to have found land and was dragging him towards the bank.

Upon reaching the sloping, muddy ground, they collapsed: eyes shut, bodies trembling, weak enough to snap in half. The sky tripped and stumbled above them, the water sizzling in their throat, and everything hurt. His head felt disturbingly light, every movement staggered and shaky. He managed to push himself up onto his elbow, spitting out the remaining river water, before collapsing back down again.

He can vaguely hear her lungs desperately grasping at oxygen, dragging it from the air with thirsty gulps. With a tentative yet dizzying movement that sends a jolt of nausea through his spine, he turns his head to see her thin, heaving ribcage, her eyes clenched shut, her sparse fingernails grinding into the dirt beneath her as she tries to find something to cling onto.

If he had the energy to, he would reach out for her and pull her into his chest, soothe her aching breaths, feel her damp, pounding heartbeat drum somewhere against his ribs and know that she was still alive. But since he was practically in the same position as she was, there was no guarantee that he would survive the exertion.

But apparently, she could.

It was a second. A heartbeat. Or maybe an hour: his mind was far beyond the capability of counting at this precise moment. And then the drunken sky was eclipsed by her, kneeling above him, her long, matted hair dripping onto his skin. Her cold fingers held his face, leaving trails of October across his cheeks. Her eyes were rusted to the core, worn and metallic and cold as iron. They impaled him like a blade, as they always seemed to do, and he struggled not to look away.

'You're alive,' she murmured in wonder, more to herself than anyone. 'You're alive,' she repeated, as if testing the words on her tongue, as if trying to convince herself.

It took several tries - many of which unearthed the remains of Amper River down his chin - before he managed to scrape a weak 'yeah' from the back of his throat.

A sharp, stinging pain struck the side of his face as she slapped him hard, and he caught a surprised yelp between his teeth. He stared up at her in shock, the bite in his cheek curling through his veins like acid. If any concept of speech hadn't been knocked from him, and he wasn't astoundingly afraid of her right now, he would have been angry. But he was caught in silence under her barbed wire stare.

'Say you fell.' The words were short and pulled out between gritted teeth, and he had no idea what they meant.

'What?' he choked out.

A slow, measured breath escaped her lips and she shut her eyes for her moment. 'Say you slipped and fell.'

He simply stared at her, eyes wide.

'Rudy!' she growled, and for a moment, he saw a flicker of grief underneath her metallic eyes. 'Just tell me you slipped.'

He shook his head in bewilderment. 'Liesel-'

'Please,' she demanded hoarsely, her voice shaking, 'Please, just say you slipped.'

'I-' he gulped and began again. 'I don't-'

'Say it,' she pleaded, the words crumbling before her. 'You stupid bastard, just say it.'

'I slipped,' he burst out. She said nothing. 'I slipped,' he repeated uncertainly.

He looked up at her face, and felt a sharp bite of remorse somewhere in his chest. Her eyes were wide, corroded at the centre, and slowly melting. She looked heartbroken, devastated. And very, very sad.

She knew.

He wanted to tell her otherwise. He wanted to tell her she was wrong. But he didn't even know the truth himself. It fled further away from him every time he attempted to think why. All reasoning had abandoned him a while ago. Rudy had never wanted to die. He had wanted to remember that he was still alive. He wanted the world to take him with it. Run away with the water. He had wanted to escape. But what was the difference? In a world where it rained bombs and siblings slept underground, was there any difference? Escape and death meant the same thing now, in the same way bravery and fear had woven together until they were indistinguishable.

Before he could think to do anything, her lips were pressed against his cheek - where her hand had struck - soft and warm and wet. His breathing slowed, his eyes closed. He felt his fingers reach up and curl around strands of her dark yellow hair.

She pulled away, her expression as unreadable as it always was. 'Why Rudy?' she said quietly. 'Why would you?'

Because everyone is dead.

Rudy looked up at her, alive and glorious and damp and so very sad. He touched her dripping face, and watched a flicker of a smile brush across her lips, before the mourning clouded her features again.

'Because I slipped,' he said simply.

There was silence. And then he heard her voice again, as flat the concrete clouds that were looming up at the edge of the world. 'Because you slipped,' she conceded.

He caught one last glimpse of her: dirt woven into her almost-German hair, skin beaten raw by the benevolently malevolent river, and eyes that dripped molten rust. And then she was gone, replaced by an uneven heartbeat of pounding footsteps against earth and concrete.

*One Last Sad Fact*

Rudy Steiner lay at the edge of the world,

Completely alone.

It was only then that the boy finally wept.

If she ever asks again, he'll tell her he slipped.

He knows it's a lie.

She knows it's a lie.

But that's just what they tell themselves.

A/N: Again, I'm very sorry, for both the lateness and for this chapter in general. It was not the easiest chapter I've ever written, nor was it the best, and it took a hell of a long time to try and write to some kind of acceptable quality. But I really wanted to show Rudy's thoughts on it all: his vulnerability and his grief. Because he was human, and a kid at that, and his whole family had just been ripped from him, and that's pretty damn devastating.

Either way, I hope you liked the chapter, if not enjoyed it (understandable), and please leave a review, because I love hearing from you all. Thanks again.