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Liesel screamed as the child was born, howling, and though Max was frightened, though he could recognize the copious amounts of blood staining the towels and blankets they'd laid out, he did not disappear again into the shadows.
He stood by her, where she laid on their bed, and held her hand. Or, moreso: he allowed her to grab his fingers and palm and wrist so hard that he could feel his bones grinding together.
There was swearing (which Max could imagine was courtesy of Rosa's influence), and sobbing, and then, at the very end, like the fantastic final sentence of a story, there was:
a baby girl, who, upon being held up by her father (who had been granted temporary release from the side of Liesel Meminger), was immediately granted all the love that two people torn up into pieces could offer. Which was quite a lot.
----
They'd discussed names, months before, when Liesel could still see her feet, and when the ground was still thick with snow.
Hans had been suggested. Along with Rosa, Rudy, Sarah, or Ahlai.
In the end, it was decided that the child deserved a name of it's own, detached from memories of bombs or mothers lost or dust-covered lips.
"I don't want our child," Max had said, rubbing at his temple, "to hear their name in our nightmares."
Liesel had nodded, and reached out a hand to touch Max's knee. "It'll be alright."
He'd taken her hand, and kissed her palm hard, and holding his mouth to her skin even after that.
"I'm frightened." His voice wobbled in time with the erratic beating of his heart.
"I know," Liesel said, and in comparison to Max's, her voice was steady, but overflowing. His hand moved over her growing stomach. "Me, too."
----
The baby was pale and pink and sleeping in Liesel's arms. The midwifes had left the apartment only minutes before, and aside from the child's steady breathing, the room was quiet.
Max stood by the bed, hands in his pockets, and watched Liesel. Watched their daughter.
"She's beautiful."
Liesel looked up at him, and her smile was weeping. She looked back to their daughter, the little girl with the tender eyes resting under tiny eyelids, and reached out a hand to Max.
"I want to name her Leah."
He decided to forego climbing into bed with her, as he wanted to, and instead squeezed her hand. "I'll be right back."
She watched the door for a long moment, and then, like clockwork, like a habit she never wanted to break, her eyesight floated back to the little girl in her arms.
It was bizarre for Liesel to think of herself as a Mother; she'd had two Mothers in her time, one who'd abandoned her with no other choice, and one with iron fists and thunder in her step. She had to wonder what sort of Mother she would be, what kind of woman she would appear as to her daughter. There had been her own Mother, with her blonde curls and loneliness, Rosa Hubermann with her iron words, Ilsa Hermann with her ghosts, Frau Holzapfel with her buried sons, and Barbara Steiner, with her six children, and her war-bound husband.
Quietly, quietly, she began to sing a lullaby, one that had followed her through the third carriage of a train, through her first and every lonely night in Himmel Street, that had followed her to the present, with Max as her husband and the little child as her daughter.
"Guten abend, gute nacht, mit rosen bedacht -"
And there, in the background, was Max, with his father's, with Hans', accordion against his chest, and his fingers moving against the keys.
He was playing the same tune that she sang, and though Liesel's voice was wobbly and pitchy, and Max's fingers were clumsy and slow, the two of them made a song, a performance improvised and conducted by the little girl with the pink fingers and green eyes.
Max pressed the silver button that Liesel adored so much as many times as he could, though it made the tune and the song uneven.
Later, much later, when birds were chirping in the sky and they were both weary with sleep, Max held the little girl in his arms. His eyes were full of tears, and he was smiling so wide that Liesel could see all his beautiful, crooked teeth.
"Leah," Max said quietly. Liesel's eyes moved to the accordion where it sat on their dresser. "It's the eyes, right?"
Liesel nodded, and entwined her legs with Max's, and leaned her chin on his shoulder.
"Exactly."
A birth certificate was written out the following week, the name printed evenly by Liesel as Max held their daughter to his chest.
He would paint the girl storybooks, about girls and stolen words and secrets and men who doubled their time as birds, and Liesel would write the girl into her books, write books for the girl, who would be the first of three children.
And on her first birthday, the girl would be rewarded with yet another - just as clumsy, though slightly more practiced - rendition of her first lullaby.