(A/N: This is my first Criminal Minds fanfic, and I haven't written anything on here for ages. This work is sort of a crossover between the show and a story of my own. It's AU in the sense that it is set in 2020, to allow for better technology, Reid has a much different past than the show sets forth, and in that we assume that the FBI can and does go to other countries to follow unsub(s) trail(s). Otherwise, all characters are the same. Rated T for certain ideologies, some violence, some language, and issues dealt with.)

The tiny older woman heard the clang of her mailbox closing after the day's mail had been dropped in it. She glanced briefly at the framed picture of her granddaughter, Katie, caught in a brief moment of happiness on the wall near her front door, then mentally shook herself. She's been gone for two years already, she told herself. Most captors kill the kids they take within a day or two. Still, it was hard to imagine that she'd never see her only grandchild graduate or marry or have children of her own. Instead, Katie only smiled from her polished frame, fifteen forever.

While thinking these thoughts, the woman was absentmindedly leafing through the mail. There were a few bills to pay, a sailing magazine for her husband, who was away working as a captain on one of the lake's many charter boats, a postcard from a friend vacationing in Florida, and…wait. It couldn't be. But there was no mistaking Katie's hasty scrawl, letters crammed tightly together, just a shade too large, and formed with little regard to straight lines. She'd pressed the pen so hard into the envelope that the letters were impressed upon the cheap paper. Nevertheless, the grandmother's name, Naomi Bartlett, was legible there. But there was no return address, just an international stamp in one corner, and a smudged postmark.

Eagerly, without even thinking of waiting for her husband of 60 years to get home so they could read it together, or of calling Katie's parents (who, she thought bitterly, never seemed to care about their daughter- after all, SHE, not her parents, first reported Katie missing,) Naomi opened the letter, only just managing not to tear the front of the envelope in the process.

After two years, it seemed, there wasn't much to say. In the envelope was only one page, like from a legal pad, and a tiny photo. Naomi looked at the photo first, feeling like all the breath had been knocked out of her body.

It was Katie. She was clearly older now, 17 probably. But what struck the grandmother was how happy she looked, how there was an air of ease and confidence about her that there had never been before in her life- she'd always seemed nervous, under pressure, never really free. Her hair was a different color, dyed a light brown shot through with glints of honey, and was a few inches shorter, and she was wearing an earring in the cartilage of her ear. She was standing on a small beach, the sky behind her mostly blue, with mist higher up, concealing hills or maybe even mountains.

Naomi must have stared at that photo for several solid minutes, then tore herself away from it to read the letter, picking up the single sheet with shaking hands, gripping it quite hard despite her arthritis.

Dear Grandma,

I'm sending you this letter to let you know I'm alive, and I'm okay. I didn't run away. Don't think that. I couldn't leave you alone, so I'd never have run, but I had no choice but to go. No one's hurt me, so don't go looking for those that took me. If you want me to be happy and to have this life I've built for myself, don't call the police. Don't look for me yourself either. Maybe one day we'll run into each other somewhere, or I'll be able to call you. I can keep sending you letters as long as you keep this quiet- just between you and Grandpa, okay? I love you guys. That's the important part. And nothing could keep me from getting in touch with you forever. (: I'll write again as soon as I can. Don't try to contact me, though.

Love, Katie

The letter looked and sounded like her Katie, but what if her captors only made her say she was all right? There was no way to tell how much she had suffered, or was suffering right at this moment. And, more than anything, she wanted her back, no matter what she had to do.

The afternoon of the next day, Wednesday, was a slow one at the BAU. JJ was flicking through briefs and casefiles, trying to decide what the team should handle next, when she came across an interesting one. The police department in Bayfield, a tiny Lake Superior town, had gotten a call from a woman whose granddaughter, Katie Peltier, 15, had been missing for two years. That she was missing was nothing unusual; so many teenagers ran away, or were kidnapped, or just disappeared. But here was the unusual part. The woman had just gotten a letter, one sent from another country altogether, from Katie. The police had no doubt that the letter was authentic, having compared handwriting samples and found one, just one, fingerprint on the paper, but one that perfectly matched Katie's prints in the missing persons database.

JJ liked these cases the best- where people could be freed, could be found again. And she was sure that police in a town of 650 could use all the help they could get.

An hour later, she and the team were on the plane as it flew west towards this tiny outpost on the edge of the cold, glittering blue jewel. JJ had just finished briefing everyone. "Reid, take a look at the psycholinguistics of the letter," Hotchner said. "What does that tell us about the unsub?"

"Unsubs, actually," Reid corrected him. "She says "those that took me. Two, or more, unsubs obviously mean a different dynamic for her."

"Multiple unsubs mean an increased amount of time spent with the victim. That means they're much more likely to hang onto her longer, which it seems they have," Rossi put in.

Just then, Skype started calling the laptop on the table in the middle of the cabin; Morgan picked up. It was Garcia, who had been analyzing the photo. "The fount of ultimate knowledge says, there's no way this photo could have been faked. And that that is definitely Katie. I ran this picture against a picture of her that her grandmother gave us right after she went missing, used the age progression software a bit…and it's a match. I also looked through the records to dig up anything about her or her family, and…well, I find it surprising that Katie didn't run away even before she was kidnapped."

"Was she being abused?" Prentiss asked.

Garcia sighed. "No one was hitting her or molesting her or anything, but her parents have been charged with neglect twice, and in reports, neighbors said that they often heard her getting screamed at, and that she seemed unhappy. It seems like her parents basically let her live in the house and kept her from starving, but didn't do anything else. Despite all of this, she was a really good student- never got in trouble, 4.0 GPA freshman year of high school, and she worked at the city library, too. But…hmm, says here that during February of that year, she was referred to the school counselor because her English teacher saw that she was cutting herself. But they never really followed up on that, especially because her parents apparently didn't care about her enough to."

Reid wasn't paying attention- he was still scrutinizing the copy of the letter. "It sounds like she's got Stockholm syndrome. She says "if you want me to be happy and to have this life I've built for myself, don't call the police."" He took a good look at the photo Katie had sent, really looked, and recognized the background. And what if Katie wasn't being forced to lie in the letter? What if she really did like her life? He put together the details quickly in his head, and when he came to their conclusion, he wanted to jump off the plane, to stop the investigation right then and there.

What if Katie was an "Alliance child?" Like he himself had been? If she was, then "freeing" her might actually be worse for her life, and would undoubtedly result in many innocent deaths.