Chapter 1: Hidden Secrets

"The family is one of nature's masterpieces." - George Santayana

Present Day Arendelle…

It was a cool day near the end of summer. There was just the faintest hint of the coming fall, in the breeze that came pouring through the open window, as Princess Anna was digging through a trunk filled with old books, which she had found in the east wing of the royal palace. At first, it seemed as though the trunk held nothing of interest, until finally, she pulled out an old edition of the Book of Heraldry, which contained the genealogy of the royal family, as far back as it was possible to trace. It was a very old one, the gray leather binding was hardened and cracked with age. According to the date on the cover, this was probably one of the first copies, perhaps the original copy, of the 1982 edition, the one created just a few months after Anna herself had been born. She opened it, and flipped to the back, the pages were yellowed and stiff from decades of disuse. She knew that it was in the back that she would find the most recent generation, her own. She expected her find herself and her sister Elsa, who would have been three at the time, but when she studied the page, she saw that there was the portrait of a second baby, directly in-between Anna and Elsa. According to his place in the record, this child was their sibling, their brother, but how could that be? As far as she had ever known, they didn't have a brother. So who was this boy?

He was a baby in the photo, probably less than a year old… therefore, given the fact that the book was from 1982, he would be in his early thirties by now. The name scroll beneath the portrait was Alexander David Vinter. It was the same last name, perhaps the scribes had made an error, putting an uncle in the wrong spot maybe… Anna wracked her brain, trying to think of who this person was and where they really fit in her family tree, but no-matter how hard she tried, she couldn't think of who this person was. So she picked up the book and went to go find Elsa so she could ask her about it.

Las Vegas, USA…

Meanwhile, Spencer Reid was in a hotel room in his home town of Las Vegas. A trip home to the house he'd grown up in, to fetch a few things for his mentally ill mother, had become the catalyst for an earth-shattering revelation.

Entering his childhood residence felt eerie, more like walking into a ghost town than a homecoming. No one had lived there since he'd had his mother committed to a mental hospital the day after his eighteenth birthday, but his mother still owned the house, having refused to sell it, and he, holding on to hope that there may come a time she could be released from Bennington, hadn't contested her decision.

The house felt too still, too long dormant. There was no electricity or running water, there was no reason for there to be any since nobody lived there. A series of locks to which only he had the keys, kept it safe from squatters and thieves. Upon entering…he'd noticed that everything was almost exactly as it had been the day his mother had left. She had sent him there to get some of her old journals and course materials from back when she'd worked at a literature professor. Spencer was eager to get what he'd been sent for and leave, this wasn't his home anymore, at best it was a relic of days long past, and a life they'd both left behind years ago. He proceeded quickly to what had been his mother's bedroom. It too, lay almost entirely untouched. There were books packed onto long, low shelves lining the walls, but still more volumes, and a multitude of notebooks, each filled to the brim with stream of consciousness, lay strewn about in stacks on the wooden floor.

He got down on his hands and knees, and pulled out the large, low leather trunk, where she had stashed her earliest journals and her class binders, when her Schizophrenia had forced her into an early retirement over two decades previously. He flipped open each of the four brass clasps, and lifted the lid. Everything he'd expected to find was in there, but so was something else. Amid the loose paperwork that fell out of the first binder as he lifted it up, there was a manila envelope. Inside, was a file filled with official paperwork and court documents. A lot of the information on the page was blacked out, like one would see in classified reports. From what he could gather, most of the documents pertained to an adoption of a one year-old baby boy, which took place and was finalized in November of 1982. The documents also said that upon adoption, the child's name had been changed, but only the first, middle, and last initials were left exposed. Both the original and the new name had been blacked out. The original initials were A.D.V and the new initials were S.A.R, and the original parents had the last name of Vinter, but that was the only identifying information left, as far as Reid could tell. If the documents identified either set of parents, which they most-likely had, that information was somewhere along the lines of text that had been blacked out. Whoever the child was, it was clear that the average person wasn't supposed to be able to find him based on these documents.

Then Reid realized something, S.A.R were his initials! How could that be? His mother had never once given him any reason to think that he wasn't biologically hers, actually, over the years she'd spoken about her pregnancy, mentioning how she'd gone off of her anti-psychotic medications for the sake of her unborn son, surely she'd been talking about him…hadn't she? But then… if that was true and he had no siblings, then why would his mother have this file to begin with?

That question, was what he now mulled over and over in his mind as he paced about his hotel room. He'd dropped off the binders his mother had asked for, trying not to give her any indication that there was anything out of the ordinary. No matter what the truth was, just admitting to her that he'd found the file under her bed, and asking the questions that would almost inevitably follow, was bound to be an awkward conversation. The more he thought about it, the more he thought better of involving her at all just yet, he'd just have to find the answers he was looking for on his own somehow… the question he was faced with now, was where to start searching…

Back in Arendelle…

Queen Elsa stared restlessly out the window of her chambers in the royal palace. For weeks now, Elsa had been plagued by memories so dim and old that she wasn't entirely sure if they were memories or merely a dream she'd had as a little girl. In this memory/dream, she was three years old, Anna was an infant, but there was another infant in a crib next to her, a boy…and he was her brother…

She never really gave much thought to whether or not this boy had actually existed, or where he might be, until she was 18, she'd overheard her parents talking one night in the hallway outside her room.

"Maybe we made a mistake, maybe we should go and get Alexander back…" her mother had proposed.

"Gerta we can't…we can't just waltz back into his life and take him away from the parents he's grown up with, call him by his birth-name and drag him back to Arendelle, he's fifteen now, it wouldn't be right to uproot him from everything he's ever known…not to mention there's no way the American courts would ever allow it. It's simply too late Gerta, I'm sorry, it's still possible that he'll figure out for himself who he is and come home on his own…he's not even old enough to have access to the records yet."

"You're right…I'm sorry…sometimes I just… I still miss him…" Elsa had heard her mother admit with a mournful, almost sobbing quality to her usually even and self-assured voice.

"I know Darling… I know…"

After over hearing that conversation, Elsa had gone and searched the archives, she found an old diary of her mother's, which had detailed how Anna was a twin, and how their brother had been given up for adoption and taken in by a couple on the west coast of America who had recently lost their own infant son. Once she found that, she understood that what she'd thought was a dream, was actually a faint memory, it had been dimmed by the long passage of time… but it had actually happened, it was real…he was real… Elsa wondered, as she stared out at the harbor, and the ocean beyond it, where he might be, what he was doing these days, and whether or not he had any idea who he really was…

Elsa's thoughts however, were broken into as a knock at the door brought her back to the here and now.

"Elsa…are you in there? Can I come in?" Anna asked.

Elsa went and opened the door, motioning for her sister to enter.

"What's going on Anna? What have you got there? She asked, nodding toward the book Anna clutched in her arms. If it was, what Elsa thought it was, then it was just possible that Anna had learned the truth about their brother as well.

At first, Anna didn't meet her sister's eye, she clutched the Book of Heraldry tightly to her chest, as if it would disappear if she dared let go, she looked down at it, as if asking it whether or not she should tell Elsa what she'd found inside, and then finally, she looked up. "Elsa…I found this, buried in a trunk in the east wing…" she told her sister, holding the book out for Elsa to take, which she did.

"Anna, this is…"

"It's a copy of the 1982 edition of the Arendellian Book of Heraldry…"

"Exactly…"

"Elsa, look at the page for our generation…there's something there I think you should see…"

Elsa turned to the page Anna had directed her to. "I see…"

"According to that, we have a third sibling…I have a twin…but how can that be?" Anna asked. "It's gotta be a mistake right?"

Elsa sighed heavily. "Actually Anna, the only mistake about this, is that they missed one when they were destroying all the evidence that he ever existed…we do have a brother out there somewhere…"

"What? Well then what happened to him? Why didn't Mamma and Papa ever say anything?" Anna asked.

"Because, they gave him up for adoption while you two were still babies… I'm sure they thought even I was too little to remember…and they were almost right…I have a faint memory of singing to him like I used to do with you when we were little…but I grew up thinking that I'd dreamed it. Then, right before they left on that ship before they died, I heard Mama and Papa talking outside my door…Mama was almost pleading to go and get him back, but Papa said that it was too late…he mentioned the American courts, so I think he was probably adopted out to an American family."

"Well now that we know, there's only one thing to do…" Anna exclaimed.

"And what is that?" Elsa asked, though she already had a pretty good idea of what Anna was going to say.

"We have to go find him of course!" Anna told her.

Elsa sighed heavily. "I was afraid you were going to suggest that. Anna, what makes you think that he would want anything to do with us if we did find him? If he knew about us, and that's a pretty big 'if' given the lengths our parents went to, to keep all this a secret, what makes you think that he would want to be found?" Elsa asked.

"Because, he's our brother…we're his family…" Anna reminded her. "How could he not want to know his own flesh and blood?" she asked.

"Because Anna, he's grown up away from Arendelle, away from us, seeing the parents who raised him and any siblings he might have had there, as his family, by now he has friends and a home, and a job…he's probably built a whole life for himself without even realizing there was a time when we were supposed to be a part of it…"

"Elsa, aren't you curious at all about who our brother grew up to be? Doesn't some part of you want to reconnect with the only other family we've got left?" Anna asked pleadingly.

"Of course I do Anna…I just…what if…" Elsa trailed off then, but honestly she didn't need to finish her question for Anna to understand what she meant. What if her powers drove him away?

"Elsa…he's our brother…I think we owe him the benefit of the doubt…he might not know us, but we don't know him either. What we do know, is that he's family…" Anna pleaded. "I'm going to try to find him, you're not going to stop me…" Anna told her defiantly.

"Of course I won't stop you, I'm going to help you…" Elsa replied with a sly smile.