Devils and Dust

Once, when he was very young, Enjolras had thought that Hitler was like the sun. Now, as he stares vacantly at the smoke shrouding the chimneys emerging from the camp, he thinks that this is what Hitler truly is—he is the smoke rising from burnt corpses and he is the lingering smell of death in the air that Enjolras will feel every day for the rest of his life. This is what it comes down to, in the end—thousands, maybe millions of people dead and more to follow, all because Germany had watched Hitler but had not seen and it had heard him but had not listened. Ignorance is not an apology - at this stage Enjolras doesn’t fool himself into believing there is any way they will ever be able to apologize for all that has happened - but it is an explanation, even though it solves nothing and does not bring back the dead.

He does not weep then and he does not break and beg for forgiveness—but that night is the first of many where Grantaire will do nothing but hold him as broken sobs wreck his body.

(Or, A Book Thief AU that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike The Book Thief.)