This story is inspired by an episode of Criminal Minds, I had Steph, Morelli and Ranger playing out the scene in my head before the episode even finished, so I knew I had to let them show the world their version of the plot.

Extra special thanks to SiennaS for beta-ing the story.

WARNING: PURE ANGST AHEAD!

The Weight of Grief

Red and blue flashing lights illuminated the scene's chaos as Ranger pulled his SUV to the curb at an abrupt jaunty angle and got out. He scanned the crowd as he pushed through to the front, urgency in his muscles, but control tempering his movements. The officer manning the barricade held up a hand, starting to tell him to stay back before recognition swept over his expression and he waved him through, directing him to the mobile command centre that had already been set up at the edge of the parking lot.

He spotted Tank instantly and quickened his pace to reach him while maintaining an outward appearance of calm, even though his heart and mind were both racing.

After three months on a government mission and three excruciating days of debriefing, Ranger had finally arrived on the command floor, eager to check in on Steph. The updates he received from the man on monitors were brief, but concerning enough that he immediately turned on his heel to race back down to the garage, calling Tank as he went.

The few extra details Tank was able to supply before rushing off the phone to focus on the situation unfolding at the restaurant weren't enough to satisfy Ranger's need for information, or the building worry for Steph's wellbeing. And the frustration of not being able to patch his phone into the comms the onsite team were using had only added to the tension drawing his aching muscles tight.

Of all the times for Hector to be on vacation.

"Report."

"Ram has eyes on them. She appears agitated. Armed. Morelli-"

Ranger's eyebrows shot up at that seemingly insignificant detail. "Armed?"

Tank nodded. "It appears to be her Smith and Wesson."

"Let's hope she's stayed true to form and it's unloaded," Ranger murmured as they entered the area where the Rangeman team had set up their equipment. He never thought he'd see the day he hoped Stephanie Plum's gun wasn't loaded.

"That may be wishful thinking." Hank looked up from a laptop screen at the desk, his usually stoic demeanour fractured by the weight of the current situation. He silently welcomed his boss with the briefest eye contact before he returned his gaze to the screen, turning it for them to see the jumble of overlapping screens he'd been reviewing.

"What am I looking at?" Ranger asked.

Hank clicked through the windows until he pulled up what looked like a simple Word document, half full of bullet-pointed notes. "Our first indication that anything was wrong today was when control received a call from Megan, who works at the Tasty Pastry, letting us know Steph had been acting strange when she dropped in."

It had been years since Steph quit bounty-hunting, but clearly the measures Ranger had put in place after a particularly gut wrenching incident about a year and a half before she quit was still working in Rangeman's favour.

During that particular incident, Steph had disappeared without a trace, completely falling off the radar for a full twenty-four hours. Ranger, his men, and the Trenton PD had questioned everyone they could think of, including employees of the establishments around town that she frequented. And all of them had reported that Steph had been acting weird when she dropped in that day. She seemed nervous, her tone was odd, and she kept mentioning that she had to take the Buick to the mechanic to get the handbrake fixed for Ranger.

The first time, when Megan at the Tasty Pastry mentioned it, he thought it was odd. For a number of reasons: Not only did Ranger not own a Buick, but the '53 Buick Steph frequently borrowed from her parents didn't have a handbrake. It had a footbrake. He figured Megan had just gotten the details mixed up. When the same details were then given by the employees of the other businesses Steph had visited in the twelve hours before she disappeared, he knew something was up.

Once they realised that the strange statements were messages meant for Ranger and his team to interpret, it didn't take them long to interpret them and narrow down the search area. They recovered her quickly after that, but it did leave Ranger to confront a gaping hole in the systems he had in place to ensure Steph's safety. One that was easily solved by tapping into the vast network of the Burg grapevine.

All it took to get the businesses onboard was the offer of discounted security services. And given that several of the places were not previously Rangeman clients, the venture ended up making him money instead of losing it for a change.

Ranger was slightly conflicted about encouraging the gossip mongers, but he figured they were going to talk either way, so why not utilise the extra 'surveillance', but years later he couldn't deny that it had been well worth it.

"Control notified Lester, who was out of the office on a call at the time and said he'd check in with her when he got a chance," Hank continued. "But the call was complicated and he never got around to it."

"It wasn't until we arrived here for lunch that we realised things were much worse than we thought," Tank added. "Police were already on site, responding to a hostage situation."

Ranger nodded, taking all this information in and filing it away as efficiently as he could while he was still figuring out the situation. "What else do we know?" he asked. He needed to fill in the rest of the picture. Who was involved? What had happened? "Were there any signs over the last few days that Steph was dealing with something?"

Tank shook his head. "She's been quiet. Keeping to herself. We figured it was because of Michael, ya know?"

"Of course." It was part of the reason Ranger had hurried along his debriefing as much as possible. He needed to get home to make sure Steph was okay with the anniversary of his death coming up.

"I liaised with Officer Costanzo when I arrived," Hank explained. "He started to mention how stretched thin they all were because of the disturbances across the city today. And I was confused as to how we could have missed the extra activity with our patrols. Usually we're near at least a couple of police incidents throughout the day, right. So Costanzo listed off the locations and times, and I had this voice in the back of my mind telling me to check Steph's tracker history." He pulled up a split screen. The progress of Steph's trackers throughout the morning was on the left, and on the right was another map with the same points plotted out on it. "The locations and times match, Ranger."

"She was at all of them?" Tank questioned, disbelief clear in his tone and he stared wide-eyed at the screen.

"So, whoever is behind all this has probably had Steph all day," Ranger surmised, running a hand through his hair. "And has intimate knowledge of our patrols if they could orchestrate this many hits across the city without encountering a single one, or being caught on a Rangeman security camera. What do we know about the perp?"

Hank, Tank and the other Rangemen and officers within earshot all snapped their heads around to stare at him, confusion and incredulity clear in their expressions.

"Ranger, man," Tank intoned. "Steph is the one holding Morelli and a young family hostage in there."

His blood ran cold. No, that couldn't be right. Steph would never do that. She didn't even like to keep her gun loaded. She never would have done all those things. And taking Morelli hostage? Ranger shook his head, struggling to wrap his head around it all. He pulled out his phone and the answer was right in front of him: August 5th.

It was today.

Today should have been Michael's seventh birthday. And it marked exactly a year since he died. Had never really recovered from the death of her son, but he'd thought she was doing better before he left for his mission. She was interacting with the guys more, engaging in jokes and banter on the comm floor again. Her improvement had given him peace of mind to accept the mission, knowing that she was making strides and letting people back in more fully.

But he'd misjudged her entirely.

"I'm going in," Ranger announced, unbuckling his utility belt and dumping it on the table beside Hank's laptop.

"I'm no expert," Hal said nervously from the other end of the desk, looking between the discarded belt and his boss who was now unstrapping his backup piece and the knife from his ankles and adding them to the pile. "But shouldn't you be gearing up to walk into a situation with an armed assailant?"

Ranger shook his head. "It's Steph," he pointed out. "She's not going to hurt me."

"She shot a security guard at the mall," Costanzo pointed out.

"She's not going to hurt me," Ranger repeated more firmly. "Gimme a comm unit and tell Ram to stand down."

"But-"

Ranger raised his eyebrow at his second in command, daring him to argue. "There is no need to have a sniper rifle trained on her."

"Yes, sir."

Hank handed Ranger a spare comm unit that he fitted into his ear, clipping the microphone to the collar of his t-shirt, and without another word, he turned on his heels and strode toward the back door to the restaurant. He would enter quietly through the kitchen and assess the scene as he crept into the main dining area of the restaurant. It was stealthier than walking in the front door and less likely to set off with the sudden invasion.

"Primo, I -" Lester said, stepping toward him as he approached the staff-only door in the back alley.

"I'm going in," Ranger cut him off.

Lester was clearly concerned by this news, and sorry that his lack of response to the alert on Steph's behaviour had led to this situation, but one look at his cousin's face had him nodding shortly and shifting to let him pass. "If anyone can talk her down, it's you."

Ranger sure hoped so. If his plan went awry, he had no weapons to aid in his and the hostages' defence. But it was important for Steph to see that he was unarmed, not there to hurt her, not afraid of what she could do to him.

The rich aroma of garlic and tomatoes filled his nostrils the second he entered, bringing with it a smattering of memories involving a young boy with dark curly hair and brown eyes, laughing over a slice of pizza. Michael had loved Pino's. Pino himself had come out to the table crammed with friends and relatives to deliver the Birthday Special on his fifth birthday, and a party at Pino's with all his new school friends was all he'd talked about in the weeks leading up to his sixth birthday. In the weeks leading up to his death.

Steph and Michael had been on their way to the party when the accident happened.

Ranger crept to the swinging kitchen door and pushed it just enough to see out into the hall, checking the coast was clear before slipping out and making his way toward the main dining area where he could hear Steph's hysterical voice encouraging someone - the kid in the young family Tank had mentioned, he assumed - to take a big bite of cake.

"Steph, stop it, he's scared," Morelli said, his voice calm but edged with apprehension. He'd never seen his ex-wife like this. Not in all the years he'd known her.

"No he's not," Steph replied adamantly. "He's excited. It's his birthday. He's been waiting for the Birthday Special for months. It's all he's talked about."

Ranger stopped at the corner of the counter, crouched low to remain unseen, and eased forward to peer into the alcove. A terrified-looking couple sat at the second last booth, the little boy clutched tightly to his mother's side as tears streamed down her cheeks. Morelli stood in the space between the booths by the windows and the tables on the opposite wall, his hands clearly visible and empty. Probably, he didn't want to shoot his ex-wife any more than Ranger did.

"He's not Michael, Babe," Ranger said, rising from his position to announce his presence. "Let him go."

Steph whirled around, her gun hand flailing wildly and making the family at the booth gasp and duck, but Ranger and Morelli remained calm, patient. They both loved her, and they both trusted her not to shoot them. Ranger himself had taken the time to train her in the gun range when she'd finally decided to get serious about bounty hunting. He knew that she was capable. She knew what she was doing, despite preferring not to use a gun. The way she held it was textbook, her finger resting near, but not on the trigger. They were safe, so long as he managed to talk her down from whatever edge she was teetering on.

"Ranger," she gasped when she spotted him. Her eyes were wide with surprise, but he could see the emptiness behind them, the grief.

"Babe." There was a long tense moment where nobody said anything. Ranger and Steph stared long and hard, exchanging energy and understanding. She was breathing heavily, getting more upset the longer they stared. "Put the gun down and let this family go, Steph," Ranger finally said. "Michael wouldn't want you to do this. He wouldn't want his mom to hurt another little boy."

"He should be here," Steph cried, squeezing her head between her hands, the gun still in her grip.

Ranger didn't like it. She'd had a barrel to the temple more times than he wanted to acknowledge, put there by lunatics and criminals desperate enough not to care what happened to them if they pulled the trigger. Fearless in taking another's life to preserve their own. And despite his earlier assessment of her control and knowledge of her skill, the proximity of the gun to her head caused his heart to stop. Her self-preservation wasn't as secure as it usually was.

"Steph, come on," Morelli tried to reason with her. His tone was calm with just a hint of pleading. Ranger didn't dare take his eyes off Steph in case she did something stupid, but he could sense the tension radiating off the other man. He was a good cop with excellent instincts and an ability to remain calm under pressure, but the fact remained that he, too, was grieving. His son had died a year ago and now he was watching the woman he loved derail in a very public, very dangerous way. "Let them go. They're scared and they didn't do anything wrong."

"No!" Her hands finally released her head but Ranger felt no relief as the gun was immediately aimed at Morelli. Her hands trembled, her finger hovering over the trigger as tears tracked down her face. There was no predicting what she was capable of at that moment.

"None of this would be happening if it weren't for you!" Steph screeched. The gun steadied as she took a step toward Morelli. "None of it! My baby is dead and-"

"Our baby," Morelli reminded her solemnly. "Steph, don't you think I'm in pain? Don't you think I miss him just as fiercely as you do? It's killing me! I haven't slept properly in a year!" As he spoke, he took slow, measured steps backwards, inching away from the family in the booth, away from Steph. And she followed, closing the distance and putting the family behind her.

The second she'd cleared the booth, Morelli flicked his eyes to Ranger, a clear instruction for him to get them out of harm's way. His nod of understanding was almost imperceptible as he focused on the terrified woman hugging her son to her chest. It took an agonisingly long moment to catch her attention long enough to beckon her toward him.

"Slow," he mouthed. "Slow." and he held a finger in front of his lips for good measure.

Steph and Morelli continued to argue as Ranger quietly directed the family to the kitchen and the door he'd used to enter. As soon as they were in the hallway, out of the way, he returned his attention to the grieving couple.

"You should have been there!" Steph cried.

And now, Ranger knew, they were getting to the core of the problem. The blame game always revealed where a person's thoughts were, and their perceptions of what had happened. He'd spoken with Steph about the day her son had died on several occasions over the last year and knew that she blamed Morelli for the fact that it had happened.

"Tell us, Babe," he requested, moving closer again now that he'd heard the service door open and close out back, a voice in his ear confirming that the family had made it out safely. "Tell us what should have happened. Tell us how to save Michael."

She shook her head, her lank curls swishing this way and that, as her hands - complete with the gun - returned to squeeze her temples, her distress increasing. He had to get the gun off her, Ranger acknowledged, before she hurt someone accidentally.

"It's too late!" She moaned. "Too late. He's always too late!"

"Who is?"

"Joe!"

And just like that, the take of the day she lost her son came tumbling off her tongue. Ranger remembered it like it was yesterday. The dark day replayed in his mind: the jolt as he saw the notification, the chaos when he arrived at the scene, the sheet covering the body on the ground, Steph's cries of anguish. And her detailed recount of the events was etched into his memory.

"You promised you would take the day off for his birthday, Joe!" she cried, her voice cracking with emotion. "You promised. It was all Michael wanted for his birthday, to spend the day with Daddy!"

Her voice broke when she said Michael's name and the cracks in Ranger's heart from years of damage caused by holding back his feelings widened further. He loved her with every fibre of his being. He always had. But he didn't trust himself not to hurt her, so he'd kept sending her back to the cop, breaking his own heart every single time, until he pushed her away one too many times and it stuck.

Steph and Joe were happily married for a year when they discovered they were expecting a child. During that time, she and Ranger had managed to salvage a friendship from the shattered remnants of their past. Perhaps, in the end, friends were all they were ever meant to be.

Morelli, too, had come to respect Ranger and his company, their previous rivalry set aside now that a clear winner had been chosen. In fact, it was Morelli who had first suggested that they name Ranger as Michael's godfather. "If anything happens to either of us, he's the one I trust to keep Michael safe," he'd declared, garnering shock from both of them. "He has the resources and he cares about him like his own."

It was true. From the moment Ranger first saw Michael's tiny pink face when he visited him and his mother in the hospital, he'd fallen in love with the kid. He had to attribute the instant love to the fact that he carried Steph's DNA because he hadn't felt much more than a sense of duty for the squalling potato that was his own daughter when he'd first met her. Love had come later with Julie, but he could acknowledge now that the love he felt for both of them was the fierce, protective love of a father, no matter the roles he played in their lives.

Ranger had readily accepted the title of godfather and developed a special bond with Michael so that he always knew he could count on him if he needed anything. He vowed that he would never let anything happen to the boy. A vow he was unable to keep, because Ranger, too, had been absent as Michael lay dying in the backseat of Steph's car on his birthday. A day that should have been full of celebrations.

"If you'd taken the day off we wouldn't have been driving down Hamilton right when a high-speed chase was underway. We wouldn't have been on our way to meet you for lunch at the station because you couldn't possibly get away from your mountain of paperwork for even an hour to meet us at Pino's for lunch like Michael wanted. He wouldn't have been upset and in a bad mood, kicking the back of my seat. And me yelling at him to stop it wouldn't have been the last thing he heard me say!"

"Babe," Ranger breathed as she suddenly burst into tears. She'd never mentioned it before, not in all the conversations they'd had.

And from the look on Morelli's face, she'd never told him either. Compassion for his ex-wife visibly swelled, emotion pushing past his trained cop face as he finally understood what had truly been wrong.

Their relationship had been strained before Michael's death, old habits creeping back in, but Steph had told Ranger that they were trying to work through it for Michael's sake. He deserved to have a stable family. With their son gone, though, there was no need to keep up appearances, no impetus to work on repairing the faults in their relationship. And with the added tension that came from the circumstances surrounding Michael's death, they were doomed. They filed for divorce six months - almost to the day - after Michael's death, and it was settled fairly quickly, all things considered.

"I yelled at him!" she sobbed. "And then the car hit us. And you weren't there, Joe. I heard the sirens and I told Micheal-" A choked sob cut her off. "I told Michael Daddy was on his way. We'll be alright because Daddy was coming."

Ranger's throat was tight. He'd been across town when the alert that the tracker on Steph's car had gone offline came through and he swiftly abandoned the skip he and Tank were trailing to race to the last transmitted location and check on her. What he found was a scene of total devastation. They had Steph out of the car already, and she was wailing uncontrollably for them to save her son, save her baby. And the first responders were trying. They had the jaws of life out and were cutting open the car, a paramedic inside with Michael, monitoring his condition carefully.

But by the time they managed to get to him, there was nothing they could do. Their attempts to revive him proved unsuccessful and he was pronounced dead at the scene. Steph's knees had given out, her wails turning to an agonised keening as Ranger gathered her to his chest, wrapping her tightly in his own unsteady arms. There was a roaring in his ears as he watched them drape a sheet over his godson's tiny body, and he was barely able to keep both himself and the boy's mother upright as the weight of grief crashed down on him.

Morelli arrived five minutes later and promptly walked away upon learning the fate of his son, a haunted look on his eyes as he slid down the side of one of the police cars and buried his face in his hands.

And having now learned about the last moments Steph had spent with her son before he passed, he couldn't imagine how she'd managed to bear it all and carry on. Ranger had regrets aplenty from all the mistakes he'd made in the army that had led to the deaths of innocent people, but nothing could compare to that of a parent beating themselves up over the possibility that their child left this earth thinking they didn't love him.

Ranger himself had grappled with the fact that Julie didn't love him for years as he'd worked to rebuild his relationship with her after the Scrog incident, but he had the luxury of being able to convince her otherwise. Steph wasn't so lucky.

"He knows you love him," Ranger assured her quietly. "He's always known how much you love him." He took a step closer, slow and smooth. "And he wouldn't have wanted you to carry around this pain. It's too heavy, Babe. You have to let it go. You have to forgive yourself. You have to forgive Joe. You all did the best you could. It hurts, I know, but you have to let it go. For Michael."

"I don't know how," she sobbed. "I don't know how to forgive myself. I don't know how to stop hurting."

Ranger took another step toward her, lifting his empty hands carefully. "You can start by giving me the gun, Babe," he instructed. "Give me the gun, and walk with me outside. We'll get you the help you need."

He glanced at Morelli, who was still too stunned to speak after Steph's revelations, that same haunted expression loitering behind his eyes, threatening to take hold. "I'm sorry," he whispered, so quiet the words were almost inaudible over the sounds of Steph's distress. "I should have been there for you both."

They must have been the words Steph needed to hear because just like that day a year ago, her knees gave out and Ranger gathered her up in his arms to keep her from collapsing to the floor. Delicately, he removed the gun from her hand and tucked it into the waistband of his cargos, then hooked an arm behind her knees and lifted her off the ground, turning on his heel to carry her out the front door. Morelli trailed behind.

Ignoring the police and his men, he carried Steph to the nearest police car where Joe Juniak, police chief and Steph's own godfather stood, concern etched into every line on his face. Juniak opened the back door of the car and Ranger set her gently inside. He took a moment to brush her hair out of her blotchy face and urge her to look at him.

"It's going to be alright," he assured her, even though he knew she was in no place to believe him just yet. "Everything is going to be okay." He held her watery gaze until she managed a small, uncertain nod, then kissed her forehead, and stepped back, closing the door on her.

"She's going to have to be charged," Juniak told him and Morelli who was hovering beside them. Both men nodded. With the crime spree she'd had today it was inevitable, but Ranger made a new vow to make sure Steph got the help she needed to move past the worst of her guilt, to accept the events of her son's death and lessen the weight of grief she carried. It would be a long road to recovery, but there were plenty of people who loved her, and who had loved Michael, to help her along the way.