~~~ Technically, this is 20 years in the future, meaning the year is 2029. I am just going to write like it's 2009 though, because I don't want to get into all that what-will-the-future-be-like-? stuff. Hope this story doesn't disapoint. I've tried to get all the ages right, but it's been hard. Please correct me if I'm wrong!

Enjoy!~~~

At nearly twenty years-old, Lucy Monroe-Messer was beautiful.

She'd never claim to be, and when anyone told her so she never accepted the compliment. But with the same smile, hair, and nose that her mother had had at her age, Lucy Monroe-Messer was easily a girl that others envied for her looks.

Lucy, unlike her mother, was very tall - five foot eight. She had bright blue eyes and very pale skin. Inevitably, she had taken after her parents and their fascination, love, and talent for science. Even when she was in elementary school, she'd come rushing home, extremely excited to let her mom and dad know that she now understood photosynthesis, metamorphoses, or whatever else she had learned that day.

Lucy wasn't an only child. Her brother, Jacob, was four years younger than her. And while Lucy looked a bit like their mom, Jake was the spitting image of their father. He did not, however, hold the same enthusiasm for science, nor did he intend to follow in their parents' footsteps as Lucy did. While Lucy was in love with her parents' world - New York City, crime investigation - Jacob was not.

Every summer Lucy and Jake would be sent to Montana. Lucy loved her grandparents dearly, but would grow restless within the second week. She was a city girl all the way to the bone, but her brother was the absolute opposite. NYC meant nothing to him - he lived for summer, and the state of Montana.

Now Lucy looked at herself in the mirror and gave herself a grin. It was Friday, May the fourth, and her birthday was in two days. Since they weren't yet of legal drinking age in America, she and her friends were going to cross the boarder to Canada in order to celebrate - in Ontario, the legal drinking age was only nineteen. Lucy would be back on Sunday, to celebrate the actual day of her birth with her family.

"Hey Lucy," her dad called from downstairs, the familiar accented voice travelling up the stairs and down the hall to the bathroom to reach her, "Your friends are here."

Lucy gave her lips one last dab of gloss before rushing down the stairs. She gave both her parents a kiss on the cheek as she began to head out the door.

"Don't forget to be back by Sunday," her dad reminded her. Lucy grinned at him and gave him a good-natured eye-roll. Like she could forget.

"And be careful!" her mom warned. Lindsay Monroe had ended up being a very protective mother.

"I know, I know," Lucy replied, "Love you both. See you soon!" she shut the door behind her and jumped into Jessica's car. She'd known Jessica since they were thirteen. In the backseat sat Marla and Avery, two girls she went to university with.

"Are you ready to party?" Jessica asked, a huge smile spread out on her face. When Lucy nodded, Jessica turned up the volume on the radio, and the car took off.

~~~***~~~

Some people joke that they were raised by wolves.

Henry LaMontagne had been raised by FBI agents.

He was taught how to operate computers by his aunt Penelope, learned how to get dates from his uncle Derek. When he reached adolescence, it was Uncle Spencer who stressed to never, ever do drugs. It was due to Aunt Emily that he could speak both French and Spanish fluently. And he had to give credit to uncles Aaron and Dave for teaching him there was a time for play and a time for work.

There were the FBI kids, too. Marianna, who Aunt Penelope and Uncle Kevin adopted from China five years after Henry himself was born. Tyler and Spencer, Uncle Derek's twins sons who were six years younger than Henry. Lily, Uncle Spencer's daughter, who was not quite four years younger and, ironically, had a learning disability.

But then there was Jack, and that was who Henry had always bonded with the most.

Jack was the closest in age to Henry, only two years older. Because of Jack's parents being divorced, Henry didn't see him as much as he saw the other kids when he was younger. But then when Henry was in fourth grade and Jack sixth, Jack's mother, Hailey, remarried and moved back into the area, so Jack and Henry ended up in the same school.

They saw one another a lot then, because Henry's mom and Jack's dad told them to look out for one another. And somehow, slowly, a friendship formed.

As children of the BAU, Henry, Jack, and all the others had attended quite a few things. The marriage of Kevin and Penelope in Vegas, which was never made official; the retirement party for Dave, which was technically his second one; and of course, every time there was a crime, they'd end up being babysat by one parent or another.

Hailey, Jack's mother, always refused to babysit or let her son be babysat. The twins mother and Derek's wife, Alicia, was always kind but often busy with her own work - she, like Henry's mother, was a liaison. Henry's father had joined the police force in Virginia, which often meant he couldn't babysit either, nor could Uncle Kevin. It was widely known and accepted that the person who the "BAU Babies" (as they had been nicknamed) liked to be looked after by the most was their Aunt Natalia.

Aunt Natalia was Uncle Spencer's longtime girlfriend and Lily's mother. Like Aunt Penelope and Uncle Kevin, Uncle Spencer and Aunt Natalia had never officially been married. There was a nice ceremony in Vegas, but unlike Penelope's and Kevin's, it was old-fashioned and elegant, put on mostly just for Uncle Spencer's mother.

While being taken care of while their parents were out of town happened almost weekly, the event that Henry always remembered the most was funerals. He didn't go to most of them, but his mother would be upset - all the BAU agents would be - and it was at this time that the BAU Babies would have to be babysat by a neighbour, instead.

Henry counted the funerals out on his fingers. Mrs. Reid, Spencer's mother, who'd died when Henry was eight; Elle Greenaway, an agent who'd left long before Henry was even born, who had died of cancer when Henry was ten; Jordan Todd, who'd covered for his mother while she was on maternity leave, was killed in the line of duty when Henry was eleven; one of Uncle Morgan's sisters was hit by a drunk driver when Henry was thirteen; then when he was sixteen, Aunt Emily's mother had died - that one had made the news.

Now Henry was twenty, and had past the age of needing to be babysat a long time ago. Today, too, was a funeral, but Henry was going to this one. "He'd have wanted you to," his mother explained tearfully, "Oh Henry, if I could have asked for one thing in life, it would have been that you could have met him."

Jason Gideon.

The name meant little to Henry, but when the news had reached the BAU the entire team was crushed. More than twenty years later, each member could remember exactly the day when Gideon had left them. Spencer - for Henry had dropped the "aunt" and "uncle" a long time ago, once he realized that the agents weren't actually related to him - seemed especially upset.

Henry heard his phone ring and rushed to answer it. He didn't live with his parents anymore - had moved into his own apartment - but they were constantly checking up on him. This time though, when he picked up the phone, it was Jack Hochner.

"Hey Jack," Henry said.

"You going to the funeral?" Jack asked.

"Yeah."

"I'll pick you up." Then Jack hung up, without saying goodbye. He was often like that, gave out just the basics and didn't waste time on anything else. Jack was a lot like his father. He even looked like his father, with the same dark eyes and dark hair - a fact which Henry knew drove Jack's mother up the wall.

Henry hear the buzzer about ten minutes later and knew his friend had arrived. He went down the stairs, not the elevator (he only ever used the elevator if such a thing was unavoidable, due to Derek and Spencer's - especially Spencer's - fear of it, a fact which Henry's mother found incredibly funny) and found Jack waiting outside. They were outside of the funeral home within minutes.

Jason Gideon had wished to be cremated, not buried, so there was a small ceremony of sorts, honouring all that he'd done in his lifetime. The other BAU Babies were already there, and Jack and Henry went to join them.

"Hello," said Jack to Marianna, Tyler, Spencer, and Lily.

"Hey," Henry added. They all replied with their own greetings, and Henry assessed them all.

Tyler and Spencer were identical, and today they wore dark suits with navy-coloured ties. The twins were the youngest of all the BAU Babies at fourteen, but they took after their dad in physique. Tall and muscular, both of them could pass for sixteen, or possibly even eighteen.

Lily Reid, who was sixteen, looked about twelve. She was maybe five feet tall and skinny, like a twig. She was flat as a board - but still very pretty. Her hair was long and brown, curling slightly, her eyes wide and hazel. She wore a long black dress and tears fell from her eyes, despite the fact that, like Henry and the other BAU Babies, she'd never met the man they were mourning.

Then there was Marianna, a year younger than Lily. Like Lily, she was incredibly thin, however she was also incredibly tall. Her sleek black hair was pulled up in two high pigtails, her ebony eyes hidden behind glasses with bright red frames. She wore a pink miniskirt with striped pink-and-black leggings, a tight white tank top with a faux-leather jacket over top, and knee-high black boots. Not exactly funeral wear, Henry couldn't help but notice.

"What?" snapped Marianna when she saw him staring, "This is supposed to be a celebration of life. Mom's dressed in yellow." Following Marianna's gaze, Henry noted that, yes, her mother was in yellow. Penelope always had interesting outfits, but it wasn't the outfit that caught his attention right now - rather, it was the woman whose shoulder Penelope was weeping on. Henry figured he'd better go say hello to his mom.

Jennifer Jareau was in her mid-fifties, her hair just beginning to grey. She had some wrinkles on her forehead, along with both smile and laugh lines, but for the most part she was aging gracefully. Now seeing her only son approach her, she gave him a sad, small smile before enwrapping him in a hug. His godmother Penelope joined in the hug, both woman openly sobbing.

Henry extracted himself from the hug, looked around wildly for his father and Kevin. Instead he spotted his godfather Spencer, who everyone called Reid, except for Henry.

Spencer Reid was in his late forties now, but when Henry compared pictures of the BAU team now and the BAU team twenty years ago, it didn't look like Spencer had aged at all. Same height, same skinny frame, same too-long brown hair, same purple bags under his eyes.

"Henry," Spencer Reid said now, "Nice to see you." very formal, despite the fact that Henry had seen him two months ago for his godfather's birthday.

"Uncle Spence. How you holding up?" Ok, so he still called them "aunt" and "uncle". He just didn't think of them that way.

Spencer's eyes were watery and his face was grim, but there was no all-out crying for him. He pushed some of his hair behind his ear. "He…he meant a lot to me." Spencer replied by way of explanation. What he didn't tell Henry was that, when he had imagined Gideon's death, he hadn't imagined it like this. Hadn't imagined receiving word from Hoch that Gideon had died in his sleep, been found days later and that it had been his son who decided the FBI deserved to know. Ideally, Reid had always thought that he and Gideon might reunite first, so that Reid could show the man who'd been like a father to him all that he'd done with his life. But in the back of his mind, he always worried that they'd be called to a crime scene one day only to end up looking down at Gideon's corpse. This was better, he supposed. Dying in their sleep was how everyone wanted to go. Reid knew the statistic. But that didn't matter to him. Dead was dead, and the fact that Gideon was was just…horrible.

As the last of the guests arrived, the ceremony began. Jason Gideon's son said a few words, as did Jack's father, and a couple more people Henry didn't really recognize.

Near the end, he heard his mother's phone ring and watched as she exited the building. When she returned minutes later, it was only to round up the team. Henry knew what that meant. Sure, they were at a funeral, and the BAU's emotional well-being was clearly a bit fractured - but crime never stopped.

Not even to mourn.