A/N - This is a sequel to Minotaur. Though you might be able to follow this story without reading that one, that story is referenced frequently and there will be some emotional leaps made here and there that won't be easily understood without that context.

Enjoy!...

October 3, 2015

I was born a child of multiple citizenship, which was never strange to me. Most of the children I encountered in my young life were in the same boat. For me, I was born very early on a foggy morning in London, exactly two weeks past my due date, on October twelfth, during a time my mother was appointed as a political attache under the Ambassador of the UK. My due date was September twenty-eighth, the night of the harvest moon in 1970, but I wasn't ready to come out yet, apparently.

My mother was familiar with the concept of having dual citizenship; she'd grown up similarly as a dual citizen of France and the United States. She was the one who went after citizenship for me in England. It provides you with opportunity, Emily, she told me several times while I was growing up. And it has; it's what's allowed me to jump between jobs that require citizenship in the United Kingdom and the United States as my mood or situation dictated.

Lune des moissons. That's what my father used to call me. Directly translated from French, it means Harvest Moon, but it irritated my mother greatly. "That's not how the French refer to the harvest moon," she harshly told him on several occasions that I can remember when I was a very young child.

"It's a good thing I'm not French then," he responded, always with a smile for me when I was in eyeshot.

When I was around six years old and we were living in Egypt, he simply shortened my nickname to Lune, which shut my mother up even though we all knew what he meant.

To this day, my parent's relationship and how they possibly came together and stayed together for so long is a mystery to me, but not as great of a mystery as my father himself. I've spent a lot of time over the years imagining my mother and father first meeting during their freshman year of college. My mother was technically a student of Radcliffe, and my father at Harvard, but in 1959, women were permitted to take classes at Harvard, and they met in September of their first year there in a Political Science class.

When my mother talked about that time, she focused mostly on her studies, and always capped the conversation with the fact that in 1963, her diploma was one of the first to ever be signed by both the President of Radcliffe and the President of Harvard.

When my father talked to me about that time, he talked of the beautiful, intriguing woman whom he fell in love with almost instantly. He told me that he started taking classes in French his second quarter because both my mother and her parents spoke French, and he wanted to impress them.

My imagination has never stretched far enough to be able to envision how my father managed to fall in love with my mother. By the time I came into the picture and started having memories, my father was soft where my mother was hard; he was romantic where she was a realist; his relaxed face settled into a pleasant smile, and my mother's into a frown.

What he had that my mother didn't was an endless stream of money. Christopher Prentiss grew up beyond privileged, and alternated time between his family's home in Raleigh, and their mansion on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. Elizabeth St. Claire grew up in an upper-middle class family that traveled a lot because her father, my grandfather, was a political attache and later an Ambassador.

What separated my mother and father as the years went by was the fact that my mother always wanted more - more money, more power, more connections - and my father would have been very content with much less.

The stories he told me when I was young centered around a small sailboat that his father bought him, and about his best friend, the maid's son, and the countless hours of happiness the two of them spent on the water. Though his parents were about country clubs and high-society gatherings, my father was much more content gutting fish and preparing it for the maid's family in their little cottage that sat behind his family's mansion. Much to his parent's chagrin, my father spent most of his free time in that cottage.

My memories of my mother when I was a young girl are powerful, harsh, no-nonsense advice and stories about pushing and busting through glass ceilings. I can't say that I'm necessarily sorry about that because that attitude got me to where I am in life, career wise. But I would have preferred at least one memory - a glimpse maybe - of the woman my father fell in love with.

My memories of my father are stories about the sea, about sailing, and about the moon. They were stories delivered with smiles and laughter and hugs and kisses. Every place we lived, my father would find water. He'd take me out on small sailboats or row boats and, be it a lake or the ocean or even a pond, I always felt relaxed out there, on the water with him, with the sun on my face. Often, we'd rock in the water and he'd read to me, a book in the language of whatever country we lived, and later, as I grew older, I'd read to him.

When we were on the ocean or a large lake, he'd have me draw a happy picture on a piece of paper that he'd roll up and place in a bottle. He'd push a cork in the top and smile at me as he tossed it far out into the water. "One day this will wash up on a shore somewhere and someone will find your picture and smile. Remember, Lune, you have the power to make even strangers smile."

"Lune," he said to me several times when I was growing up, "Did you know that a full moon clears the clouds in the sky? It's what we seafarers count on. You are my full moon."

I felt safe with my father, but I didn't feel safe with my mother's reactions to our activities together. When we'd return home, often muddied or sandy and wet, with fish on a hook, she'd harass my father about how he wasn't doing me any favors, allowing me to be a tomboy.

"Relax, Elizabeth," he'd tell her. "Our little lune is just right the way she is. She can be the guest at diplomatic dinners and have perfect manners, and she can sail and fish with me."

"Her name is Emily," my mother would state harshly while shaking her head at me, like I was a deep disappointment to her.

When we lived in places where access to a body of water was difficult, or when the weather was bad, my father shared with me his other hobby: The impossible bottle. He spent countless hours with his glasses perched on the tip of his nose, rigging masts and sails with miniscule hinges and delicate string. It was always like a magic show for me, how he'd place the hull and keel of the ship inside of a glass bottle and then pull some strings and the sails and masts would rise up inside, creating a stunning visual effect.

When I was thirteen, three things happened: My grandfather retired from his political career and randomly decided he wanted a quieter life in the French Alps, my mother was assigned to a position in Rome, and I started the rapid process that only puberty could bestow so harshly on a girl and went from child to young woman seemingly overnight.

I was never sure if my mother's criticism for me and my father increased several notches because of how her father was choosing to retire, in a cabin with no running water or electricity, or if it was because of me growing up. For whatever the reason, she started really laying into my father at every opportunity. Their fights were epic and I listened to them with tears in my eyes while huddled in my room.

"You agreed to have a child, and I committed myself to raising her while you pursued your career," my father would yell.

"She's getting older now, and that doesn't work anymore. She has to learn her place in this world. She has a family legacy of a life in politics she has to uphold," my mother would yell back.

The end result of those catastrophic arguments was that I was no longer allowed to spend time with my father out on the water, and I was no longer allowed to wear anything that did not say dignified young lady. My father still called me Lune. He still shared with me his friendly smiles, but they were less frequent. The light disappeared from his eyes. Looking back now, I can see my father during that time and recognize the signs of clinical depression.

I told Hotch one time, many years ago, that I thought politics ripped families apart, but I never told him or anyone else the details of how they had torn my family apart.

One day right before my fifteenth birthday, my mother and I returned home from visiting my grandfather and found my father gone. I heard my mother talking to her friend on the phone about how he'd taken five thousand dollars from their account, his passport and a suitcase, but had left her with everything else. At that point his parents were dead, and the amount of money he had walked away from and left with my mother was significant.

He left me with a ship in a bottle, Little Lune, painted on the hull, and a note. "You will always be the one who chases the clouds away for me."

I never saw him again.

At first I was devastatingly depressed, and then I was bitterly angry. In the middle of that, while my mother was trying to make my outer shell as hard as hers and I was just craving warmth - any warmth at all - I slept with a friend. I got pregnant and had an abortion, and the emotional aftermath was enough for me to think that maybe my mother was onto something: A hard exterior and pushing feelings down or exorcising them completely seemed to be the right way to go.

I can honestly not remember a time I laughed out loud - something I'd freely done with my father for years - from the time I was fifteen until I arrived at college.

I told Derek back in August that I liked working for Interpol because constantly having to pretend to be someone else and go undercover made me not have to examine myself too closely. When Clyde refused to let me back in right after Doyle was arrested and said I needed to do something else for awhile, he was the one who selected the BAU for me. In the fall of 2006, something amazing and entirely unexpected happened: I found my father within me again and was able to reconnect with that person inside me who had an easy laugh and quick wit and enjoyed more than just the day-in day-out of living like an emotionless, unbreakable, perfect person.

But I lost her again eventually, and I moved back to London and went back to Interpol, like a dog going into a dark corner to lick my wounds. Away from everyone at the BAU, it was easy to just let my hard exterior be who I was, unless Clyde was being pushy and impossible; I softened around him sometimes.

But the case this past August changed absolutely everything for me.

I didn't put my flat in London on the market. When I read Clyde's letter twelve days ago, it sent me into frantic motion, and I didn't give myself time to stop and think because I knew I would have talked myself out of this move. I quit my job, packed up my personal belongings, and offered my flat for rent to an agent at Interpol whose wife just had twins and I knew he was looking for a bigger place. I gave him a screaming deal on my fully furnished flat, with one catch: that he ship my boxes to me as soon as I had an address to ship them to. They're on their way now.

I've accepted a new job at the Department of Intelligence that will, for the most part, come with regular, predictable hours, and I start next Monday.

The townhouse I've rented is narrow and three stories and far too large for one person, but it had what I wanted: balconies overlooking the Potomac where I can watch the boats passing by. I have a small yard, which is something I've never had before in any place I've ever lived, but I decided that putting things in dirt and watching them grow was something I wanted to experience in my life.

And I have what most of the world would call a boyfriend, though that word seems too juvenile for a woman who is days away from forty-five years old, and it's so trite for what Derek Morgan means to me it's laughable.

Six days ago, I landed at Dulles with two suitcases, Clyde Easter's urn, and the intent of unloading on Derek Morgan the entirety of my issues. I rented a car and drove to his house. His mom let me in and hugged me; she said, "I knew you'd come," in my ear.

But then I saw him outside, laying on a lounge chair and staring up at the orange moon in the sky. He was utterly beautiful and terrifying at the same time and I had to whisper "Don't run," to myself before I spoke to him.

My secrets and issues died on my lips, and I talked instead of a slow beginning, of starting over without anything desperate or terrifying as the backdrop for our relationship.

To him, it probably wasn't huge, but I told him a small story about my father; it was the first time I'd ever told a personal story about my father to anyone. I decided to give him the pieces of myself over time, as I could, like I figured most people did when they entered into a relationship.

I couldn't bring myself to tell him that I'd been exposed to HIV on the case in August, or that it had been so long after my exposure that antiretrovirals were useless, and I'm just going to have to wait it out until the middle of November and re-test. After three weeks of dealing with the aftermath of the Minotaur case on my own, I could imagine no greater comfort than falling naked into Derek's bed and arms, but I settled for laying with him on a lounge chair for a couple of hours, talking quietly and staring at the moon.

He's following my lead so far. I've met him for lunch and we've gone out to dinner. We've gone furniture shopping for my new place in the evenings and sat together on the balcony here, looking out at the water. We hold hands and we kiss and we lay together on my new sofa and watch TV, but he goes home every night, even though he and I both know we want him to stay.

It seems almost silly considering everything we shared back in August, but it also seems right, this slow path to...something.

The bottle with the ship in it that my father left me has always come with me, wherever I lived, but it's stayed packed away in a box. Here, for the first time, it sits prominently on the mantle, and when Derek asked me about it, I told him about my father and his countless hours creating those ships in a bottle when I was a little girl.

He doesn't press me for more information than I'm willing to give, like he can sense that I'm treading on uncharted waters when I talk about my dad. I haven't told him the stark reality: I haven't told him that my father was everything good in my world and then one day just disappeared and I never heard from him again.

We haven't touched on the huge issues I have with trust because of that. Nor have I mentioned the irony, that it's easier for me to trust people with my life than it is to trust them with my heart. I think it's because I know death would be fast, and injury might physically hurt me, but having my heart broken again might destroy me.

I've been faced with a hell of a lot of nearly impossible undercover operations that I've always managed to get through. But this - this going undercover as myself - is going to be the most difficult thing I've ever faced. I'm alone here, without a real compass that doesn't have a competing interest in the end result. For the first time, I'm going into something like this without a plan or intended outcome.

There is my heart and my mind and Derek Morgan. There is my past and his past and an uncertain, but hopeful future.

My journey in life has had twists and turns and huge uphill climbs and a few frightening freefalls down the other side. But never have I allowed myself a journey like this - to find myself, to give myself time to live, and to let myself love someone like I love Derek Morgan, and allow him to love me back.

This is my own, personal Everest, and I've decided to climb it to the peak, even though I don't know what the path or end will look like.