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Audrey Elizabeth Bell was born on the twenty-second of August in 1980 to Alison, an English university professor, and Dean Bell, a retired, American FBI agent. She was born in England, and lived on the better side of life for her first ten years.
Not long after her tenth birthday, however, she witnessed her mother's suicide, her wrists slit with a razor as she sank into the bathtub. Audrey was found by her father crying over the bloody tub once he returned from a meeting with an old friend.
Immediately after that, she and her father moved to Virginia to be closer to her paternal grandparents who, from then on, had a hand in raising her. Unable to cope with the death of his wife, Audrey's father returned to the FBI as an agent in the Domestic Trafficking taskforce.
With her life turned upside down and her father now absent, Audrey began to act out. She stayed out late partying, drinking practically anything that was passed to her, and clung to the nearest lips as if that would save her. Anything to make her feel needed. And it wasn't long until things went dreadfully wrong. When she was fifteen, she met Hunter O'Connell, a seventeen-year-old boy with a fierce hand and mind that wouldn't take no for an answer. In the back of his dad's truck, he took her. And he kept taking her for months, leaving purple rings around her neck and scars on her skin.
Depression struck her like lightning. Her grandparents did their best to reach out to her, to bring her back from the brink when they found a bloody razorblade in the bathroom bin. Fearing for the worst for his daughter, Dean called an old friend.
That was when Audrey met Jason Gideon.
He profiled her, and while his voice was calm and understanding, his profile cut Audrey deep. She has a deep-seated need to be needed, and her father didn't give her that. Her mother didn't give her that. And in the process of searching for someone to need her, she destroyed herself. But she couldn't give up, because the world needed her. Because in her time amongst chaotic social circles, she'd developed the skill to identify people, their wants, their needs, and she'd fit herself into that narrative. By all accounts, she'd developed the skills of a profiler.
She enrolled in the Academy as soon as she could, and after learning about Hunter and his violent tendencies, her father insisted she move into her own apartment for her safety, only a stone's throw away from the FBI's Quantico offices.
Audrey pushed herself through years of training and education, until finally she graduated the academy. And upon Gideon's return to the BAU, he brought her along too.
