Painter Of Horizons

Alex and Dave met by incidence in London, when Dave was on book tour for visit and happened to run into Alex who lived and worked in London as a social worker. Some time after 9/11 they acidentally run into each other again on a conference*. Work wise things back in London are going downhill: lots of red tape, budget cuts, programs shut down - the regular yet insanely frustrating thing to happen to the most needed areas of public life as we all know it. Dave then informs Alex about a new unit the FBI is about to implement that might be interesting for her work wise (the Victims Assistance Unit). Alex very much reacts with spite - she's got a job she's good at, and even *if* she was to think about a change she definitely didn't need some random dude's help.

Well well well, and then things in Alex' private life go fubar in London. That's tipping her to a very impulsive application with the FBI after all, complete private life induced panic reaction. Poor girl has a tendency to run from her problems in big scale, aka lets just fuck off to another continent alltogether. (Yes, she has done that before...)

That' how she ends up helping build that new unit over at the FBI, where she does good work and stays for years. Great team, meaningful work, the change of scenery is good for her mental health. Plus, she starts volunteering with the local BACA shapter and in the end, that work at the youth club over there is her actual calling.

Fast forward to season six-ish? When Emily Prentiss gets 'killed' and the BAU is short staffed.** They run into a tough case that involves runaway teens and Dave gets Alex on board to assist with the case due to her professional and personal background. She stays around for another handful of cases since they need the helping hand. It turns out though that both Alex had the bad luck that those few cases were extra bad ones and that she's not made for that kind of work. She's good with helping the living, but the BAU work gets close to break her. So she leaves the BAU again and returns back to the VAU, back to help the living. The short time she's spent with the BAU she mostly stayed after that initial case because Dave had asked her for help and she knows they're short staffed and feels responsible to help when she can. Takes Dave some effort to make her understand that she's not the only one who can do the job and it's okay to say she can't (or doesn't want to) do it.

She could have just left the FBI alltogether after leaving the BAU. But once you saw those things happen in real life, you don't just leave and become a barista if you're into the cause. So there she is, back with the VAU.

So in the end her move to the States was mostly induced by handling problems in her private life in London back then very poorly (I don't blame her), because she could have repositioned in London/UK job wise easily in one way or another. But if the girl's doing something, she's willing to fully commit, and she ended up finding both her professional calling and a wonderful found family in the States, so at least poor personal decisions worked out in the end. She has to suffer first though before she can get happy.

I'm planning to both go into the VAU and BAU work more in detail in fic later, so lets keep it short for now.

*you can totally see from when I wrote that ten-ish years ago that I was back then in my peak academic enthusiastic phase of life ^^''