HP Background:

After the Final Battle, Harry and Hermione continued their education at Hogwarts of the final year offered to those who could not attend their final year while Ron refused to. Ron went on numerous speaking tours while the other two worked hard at Hogwarts, emphasizing his own role in the action-filled final year, before trying to join the Aurors after they graduated in 1998. He failed to meet the minimum requirements, blaming Harry and Hermione for not helping him succeed. The trio drifted apart as Harry and Hermione helped Kingsley and others to restructure the DMLE and the Ministry as a whole, bringing it closer to their Muggle counterparts.

Both Harry and Hermione continued their educations in the Muggle world. Harry went to Lancaster University for his bachelor's degree in criminal justice and to St. Andrews for a Master's of Psychology while working in the (now defunct) Auror department to bring its' investigative practices up to the modern times. Hermione went to Oxford for her law degree while helping the former DA construct a fair constitution and got her doctorates in History, Anthropology, and Sociology.

Between some former members of the DA (Potter, Granger, Lovegood, Longbottom, Bones, Abbot, MacMillian, Chang, etc…) and some unexpected aid from the former Slytherins (Malfoy, Greengrass, and Davis), they managed to pass a new constitution and structure an elected two-house Parliament to deal with make new laws and ratify old ones. Harry and Hermione also help to restructure the Law Enforcement section of the DMLE and merge it into the existing New Scotland Yard as an offshoot of Special Branch. Muggles would know it as merely a classified section of Special Branch. They also helped create, from scratch, the magical section of the Crown Prosecution Service and a Public Defenders office so that everyone could have access to a barrister during a criminal trial.

Twelve years later, Harry is a Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) in the Major Crimes Division of Special M Branch. He adopted his godson, Teddy, ten years previously when Andromeda died in a Death Eater attack aimed at Harry. Teddy's in his second year at Hogwarts, a Hufflepuff like his mother. Hermione is a Crown Prosecutor on detachment to Special M Branch. Neither are married, choosing to focus on their careers and changing the corrupt landscape of the Ministry of Magic instead of engaging in any serious romantic entanglements.

Both young Magicals have hit a wall in both their personal lives and their careers. While Harry was a young DCI at the age of thirty, he often had to fight to get into the field instead of being stuck in an office doing paperwork and inter-departmental cooperation. He spent more time filing paperwork and reviewing his detectives work than he spent in the field doing actual police work. Harry felt like the only time he got out of the office was when there was a big raid or when a there was a crime that his DCs and DIs couldn't handle. For someone who spent his childhood and adolescence constantly in the middle of everything, the monotony of paperwork was slowly killing the active man. There was even talk going around the office that Kingsley wanted to promote him to a Detective Superintendent within the next two years, which would completely shackle him to a desk. He was one of the most powerful wizards in world, surely paperwork killing him in his thirties wasn't his fate!

Hermione, on the other hand, was swamped with both paperwork and arguing cases because she was only one of four prosecutors in the Special M Branch of the Crown Prosecution Service. The new requirements for barristers required that they pass both the Muggle Bar Exam required for the Muggle CPS along with the newly created Magical Bar Exam covering the new laws created under the new Magical Constitution. She spent ninety-hour weeks in the office, where the only human contact she had outside of the courtroom was her secretary and Harry bringing her takeout. Draco Malfoy, Cho Chang, and Tracey Goldwell (formerly Davis) were her fellow prosecutors and they were all just as busy as she was.

There were only four Public Defenders, totaling the eight total people who had passed both Bar Exams. Jackson Ackinson, Icarus Diggle, Astoria Malfoy (formerly Greengrass), and Sally-Ann Perkins were the Public Defenders and they worked just as many hours as the prosecutors. Hermione had no room for advancement because there was nowhere to go, at least until the Special M Branch of the Crown Prosecution Service becomes more established and more barristers become available, which would take at least another decade. The ninety-hour weeks were slowly killing her and she needed something different.

Both of them felt that they need a change. After a dozen years in public service, both Harry and Hermione were slowly being driven insane by the requirements of their positions. They both felt that they needed to be in the field, using their talents in more active ways. Hermione particularly wanted a position where she could use her skills as an investigator and fighter instead of just her research skills. Unfortunately, they knew that they could never escape the fame they acquired in the Blood Wars and the subsequent restructuring of their government while staying in Magical Europe. The only solution was looking across the pond for positions in Law Enforcement.

Using their contacts in the ICW, Harry managed to find out about a specialty unit of the American FBI called the Behavioral Analysis Unit. The unit primarily worked with serial killers, something that Harry had some experience with as part of his duties in Major Crimes and Hermione had experience as a prosecutor. Together with Hermione, the pair spend their summer working with the ICW liaison to the FBI so that they could become part of this specialty unit. It took until mid-October, but both Harry and Hermione managed to clear their caseloads and move all active investigations on the desks of others.

With help from a number of house-elves whom they had saved after the deaths of several pure-blood Houses in the Second War, the pair moved into a brownstone in Washington D.C and Teddy was set to join them at Christmas. They had to take a number of exams and file a truly horrendous amount of paperwork which took until early November, but both Magicals were finally cleared to join the BAU as soon as the team returned from their most recent case. They were to report in on Monday morning, ready to duty.

Criminal Minds Background:

Aaron Hotchner: Wizard

Aaron Hotchner has always had a secret, one buried deep in his past. He was a wizard, born to No-Maj parents and his little brother Sean was also a No-Maj. No one in his unit knew, only a handful of upper-level brass in the FBI knew his secret. Aaron had attended Ilvermorny as a Wampus, learning magic until the age of seventeen. When he got out, Aaron realized that he was estranged from his family, particularly from his little brother Sean. This made him determined to stay in the non-magical world, so that he could rebuild the relationships that he lost.

Aaron had the opportunity to go into the Aurors, but he decided to get his degree from Mary Baldwin and went on to get his Juris Doctor at George Washington University in 1990. He became a prosecutor before changing over to be a profiler for the FBI in Seattle. Aaron finally came back to Quantico to take up the role of Unit Chief for the BAU. Magic never held any interest to Aaron after he joined the BAU, though he always kept his wand in his go bag just in case.

His son, Jack, began to show signs of magic several years ago, signs that he managed to hide from his wife. However, Haley died to Foyet before he could tell her about his secret and that their son was a wizard as well. Now that the brass had sent down an order for him to add two new people to his unit, two Magicals from the UK, Aaron knew that he had to find a way to tell Jack about his heritage.

He knew that European Magicals had a tendency to be… condescending to their No-Maj counterparts, as well as preferring to use magic for everything. Behavior like that would not be welcome or useful in his unit, particularly since he was the only one who knew anything about magic, to the best of his knowledge. Hopefully the Magicals in the brass knew that when they decided to assign Potter and Granger to his team. Aaron could only wait and evaluate the pair when they came into work on Monday.

Spencer Reid: In The Know

Spencer Reid always had a secret, one that wasn't about him. One of his best friends was a statistical anomaly, someone who could manipulate energy at the most basic level. His friend, Marcus Bandola, said it was magic even though that was impossible. Magic was just a way of describing something unexplainable until it was possible to explain the phenomenon. Marcus had made Spencer promise to never tell anyone that he knew about his abilities. Spencer had kept that promise for almost twenty years, fearing that one of the people whom Marcus had called Oblivators would come and erase parts of his precious memory. It infuriated and terrified the young genius that they could possibly come and monkey about with something that he valued so highly. Spencer wished that he could talk to anyone

Penelope Garcia: Witch

Penelope Garcia had lots of secrets. She was a former blackhat hacker named the Black Queen, acted in theater shows, and knew everything she possibly could about everyone on her team. The curvy woman was protective of those in her circle, almost to a fault, and that protection generally took the form of information gathering. Penelope had one more secret, a secret that escaped even the top brass in the FBI. She was a witch.

Her parents had been Magicals, killed in a car crash by a drunk driver. She had been homeschooled by her parents and a small community of fellow Magicals that lived around them but her passion had always been technology. There was very little opportunity for a job involving technology in the Magical world, so she went to Cal Tech for a while before dropping out after her parent's death to become a hacker in the underground. Penelope never even carried her wand any more, it was locked away in a drawer beside her bed. Now there were two new people coming into her world and she was digging deep. She had to find out if there was anything, anything at all, that could threaten her precious people when these new people showed up.

Penelope found several things in their history that made her dig deeper. Both had educational histories which stopped at age eleven, then restarted again at age eighteen, nineteen in Granger's case. Potter had mediocre grades in primary school, then when he reappeared to take his GCSE's, he scored A's and A* in seven core subjects. He scored similarly on his A-Levels before going to Lancaster University and rocketing through his degree in Criminology. Potter then joined a division of Special Branch that Penelope couldn't access, something that frustrated her, and quickly rose to be a Detective Constable while going to night school for his Master's of Psychology, finishing in only two years despite being on the job while taking classes. He continued up the ranks quickly, becoming a Detective Chief Inspector four years ago, earning several commendations along the way.

His partner was even more impressive. Granger was lauded a genius while in primary school and proved herself when she took her GCSE's and A-Levels in quick succession. She finished her undergraduate degree at Oxford in a year and a half, taking another six months to take the Bar Exam before joining a different division of Special Branch under the Crown Prosecution Service. Granger worked for CPS while finishing her triple doctorates in Anthropology, History, and Sociology at Oxford in just under three years.

Penelope hated that she could not access anything in their work files other than Potter's rank and public commendations, his conviction rate, and Granger's conviction rate. It was like their unit's network led down a black hole of nothingness. The only personal details that she could access were that Granger's parents were well-off cosmetic dentists, that neither was married, and Potter had an adopted son named Edward "Teddy" Lupin-Potter. Oh, and Potter was rich. Like, Richie Rich or Scrooge MacDuck rich. But that was all that she could find and it was driving her batty!

It took her several days to come to the realization that maybe her problem in accessing their records in the black hole of nothingness was because it was, in fact, a black hole of nothingness! They were Magicals! That explained so much! But, how could she, the Queen of Technology, access information that wasn't held in any technological network!? Penelope fumed that she couldn't find anything on them and had to wait, like everyone else, until she met them on their first day of duty.