A/N: Okay, there are going to be a hundred of these, and I can't see subjecting the people who have me on author alert to a hundred alerts for a fandom most of them don't read, so I'm going to stop posting them here. If you want to keep reading them, contact me via review and I'll let you know where you can find them. Also, this story may need a hankie alert if you are particularly sniffle-prone. Fair warning!

011.

Red.

Who wears a red tie to a funeral?

She'd asked him exactly that question six months ago, when a widely-disliked city official had passed away and Fritz had drawn the FBI's short straw and gotten stuck having to represent his department at the service. She'd offered to go with him, and when she'd come out of the bedroom dressed in her nicest black suit, she'd been horrified to find him wearing a black suit of his own paired with a red tie. She'd scolded him, informing him firmly that it was the utter pinnacle of tackiness to wear anything red to a funeral, and that even if Satan himself had passed away, the appropriate tie color would still be black. Her mother, she'd insisted, would absolutely die if she heard about this. He'd laughed but acquiesced, removing the tie obediently and allowing her to replace it with a somber black one.

"Fair enough," he'd told her. "But I'm wearing that tie to my funeral. Nobody can complain that it's tacky if the dead guest-of-honor is wearing it."

She'd scolded him again, this time for cracking such a morbid joke at such an inappropriate time, and with one last amused smile he'd changed the topic. She hadn't known that she'd ever think of that particular conversation again.

She hadn't known that, six months later, Fritz would be standing in line at the grocery store at one in the morning because they'd run out of eggnog and she'd insisted that they couldn't finish decorating the tree without it, and that, while he was pulling out his wallet and chatting with the cashier about the unseasonably warm weather, three teenagers high on crystal meth would try to rob the store.

She hadn't known that there would be a thirty-two-year-old mother of four standing in line behind him, or that when the shooting started he would tackle the woman to the floor, shielding her from the bullets even as three of them hit him squarely in the back. She hadn't known that there would be a knock at her door an hour later, just after she'd started to worry about Fritz, or that Daniels and Gabriel would be standing teary-eyed on her doorstep, charged with the unenviable task of having to tell her that the man she loved was dead.

She hadn't known that, in the middle of making the funeral arrangements, she'd remember that conversation about the tie, or that she'd insist over the protestations of the funeral home directors that he had to wear that awful red tie for the funeral. She hadn't known that she'd be sitting rigidly during the service, her mother on one side and Fritz's estranged sister on the other and the rest of the room filled to bursting with federal agents and LAPD officers and all the other people whose lives he'd touched, or that her mind would be completely occupied with that damned tie because if she let herself think about anything else, about the pain or the fear or the anger or the despair that had wrapped itself around the empty place in her heart and refused to let go, she'd start to cry and she'd never be able to stop.

So she sat, hands clenched tightly in her lap, as the FBI regional director gave a long-winded speech about Fritz's accomplishments that Fritz would have hated, and she kept staring straight ahead as her mother gave her arm a gentle pat and Ilsa wept silently next to her, and she wondered what strange twist of fate would have led her to fall in love with a man who would wear a red tie to his own funeral.