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Reid supposes the reason he became a profiler was because he wanted to understand people.
He's always noticed how people read each other. How they can see joy or sadness in the crinkle of an eye, or how they can naturally tell when a smile is a hologram instead of real happiness. They can read body language like a book, and Reid, as quickly as he can read words, cannot comprehend it.
It's like they're all in on some joke he Doesn't Get. Laughter like strong vodka peals through places he visits and he never understands them. People whisper, voices a dark violet that fades into the black backdrop of normal speech. They know instantly how to ask for food in a polite way, they speak with the ease of a spinning wheel, and their hands remain still at their sides.
It may be a weakness in his line of work, but he's learned to read body language on a conscious level. He’ll never be a native speaker, but he can at least survive in their foreign country.
***
He's not ignorant. He knows what the symptoms add up to.
He gathers evidence. Draws conclusions.
Like any other science experiment, but with himself as the test subject.
***
He's never gotten an official diagnosis. His mother has always been afraid of psychiatrists, believing that they're a part of a vast governmental conspiracy to control the masses. But Diana Reid has always known her son is special.
When he’s four years old, he has a meltdown in his third grade classroom. The primary colors of the classroom walls are too bright, the voices of his classmates like razor blades. He screams to drown out the noise. He clutches his hands over his ears as he rocks.
The teacher calls his mother.
“I know about Spencer’s considerable intelligence, but I feel he is not emotionally ready for school,” Mrs. Milligan says in the school office. Spencer can hear her talking to his mother.
“He’ll be bored,” says Diana, her fists clenched. She's surprisingly lucid today.
Lucid: A word he learned recently. It means clarity and awareness of surroundings. His mother isn't lucid enough, he's too lucid. Funny how these things happen.
“It's not about that…” Mrs. Milligan says. “Have you ever considered the idea that your son might be autistic?”
Diana crosses her arms and doesn't answer.
“He's bright, but he scares the other kids. Kids who are more… normal. I'm sorry, but this is beyond my abilities as a teacher.
Diana doesn't say another word. She grabs Spencer’s arm and leaves.
***
He's ten and in his first year of high school when someone says, “You look like a retard.”
He's been flapping with excitement all morning, but the girl next to him, with her pink hair and switchblade smile has only now decided to do something about it.
There are a lot of ironic things about that statement. For one, the fact that he’s several years younger than her hardly qualifies him as intellectually disabled. Furthermore, intellectual disability is invisible.
“Actually -” he begins to refute this obviously untrue statement, but the girl stops him.
“Look, okay? Friendly piece of advice? Stop flapping your fucking hands. Are you autistic or something?”
There's that word again.
He hears it hushed through the halls, heavy in the mouths of psychologists who have no idea how to handle him.
He folds his hands together beneath his desk and stifles the remaining flaps, like crushing a baby bird.
***
When Spencer graduated high school, he hems his graduation robe and alters it with clumsy and shaking fingers. He knows the word for his clumsiness now: dyspraxia.
His mother is not in the crowd and he is not disappointed, he is not.
Spencer bikes to the library and searches through the crime novels. He's read them all. When he tells the librarian this, she raises a dubious eyebrow, but leads him to the true crime section.
There he picks up a book by David J. Rossi. He reads about criminal profiling, how profilers can assume things about people based on their actions. They read people like he reads books, and Spencer wants to know how to do both.
***
This is the first time he’s had friends.
He associates each person with a color.
Morgan is green. A dark, rich green like a forest at dusk. Hotch is a dark red, Garcia is a playful orange, JJ is a soft lavender, Elle is a dark blue. Their personalities work like a color palette, painting the bullpen with each of their personalities.
He starts to get an idea of who they are. How they mix together, what colors contrast and which colors are complementary.
Yeah, they think he’s weird.
(Who wouldn’t?)
But he can talk (almost all the time), feed himself (although he hangs a sign on his bathroom door prompting him to make himself dinner), and work like a functional adult.
(He doesn’t need to ask for accommodations. He’ll be Just Fine.)
***
Whenever Reid Doesn’t Get Something, like when he should stop talking about Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel, Hotch doesn’t say anything. Sure, if it’s really important he’ll cut Reid off, but for the most part, he listens to, or pretends to listen to, what Reid has to say. Because even though his endless stream of factoids can get exhausting sometimes, there are often important or interesting things he’d appreciate more if they weren’t in a deadly situation.
He listens to Reid talk in the car, just listening. When the rest of the team rolls their eyes, Hotch either listens or plows right over Reid’s words if necessary.
When Reid asks to speak, Hotch lets him add whatever he’s thought of to the conversation within reason. After all, it doesn’t hurt anyone.
Hotch notices that Reid gets self conscious when his infodumping is pointed out or if Reid notices it himself. It reminds Hotch of Jack’s shame when he got in trouble at school. And Hotch wonders who told Reid his opinions and thoughts were so unimportant that he has to cram every last one of them together if he wants them to be heard.
***
Spencer never plans on telling his team he's autistic.
They've guessed anyways. As much as he's studied autism and how to hide autistic traits, he can't pass as neurotypical.
Maybe if he tries harder, no one will be able to tell.
He's quenched his stims, the more obvious ones, at least. He combats his own social awkwardness with facts and statistics.
They still notice of course. It's not something he’ll ever be able to hide completely.
Elle asks Reid if he ever just feels “burned out” on the job.
Reid doesn’t know how to answer it.
“I get stressed out.” Spencer says, hoping that’s the sort of answer she wants to hear.
Elle sighs. Spencer supposes that’s how people say, “You don’t get it.”
Three weeks later Elle leaves.
Reid promises himself that he won’t burn out.
***
And Gideon…
Gideon is shame and cologne. His skin radiates anger and fear. Even Spencer can feel that. He shows more frustration than the others at Reid’s infodumps and odd way of moving. But Gideon praises Spencer, Reid can feel the pride like sunlight washing over him and settling in his stomach.
Gideon is the color of the sun, beautiful and destructive and everything Reid wants to be.
He’ll do anything to please Gideon. He'll break down into tiny particles and reconstruct himself in Gideon’s image.
He doesn't speak out of turn as much anymore. He works on his coordination every time he goes home. He practices his gunshots. He watches Gideon intently, mimicking the lines he used on families, his posture, everything.
One thing he can't mimic is Gideon’s ruthlessness. Gideon calculates each move he makes; he sees the world in the same black and white as his chess table.
They say autistic people are supposed to be ruthless, but the most ruthless people he’s ever met have been neurotypical, even taking unsubs into account.
***
Prentiss arrives. She strikes Spencer as another person who must have been an outcast as a kid. When he talks to her, her personality is sable. Even though Spencer’s always been afraid of the dark, Prentiss’s particular shade of dark is comforting.
One night she invites him to watch movies in Russian with her. They sit in her almost-bare living room. Spencer translates sentences Prentiss doesn’t understand and encourages her broken Russian. They sip at dessert wine and eat Prentiss’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. Sergio rubs up against his shoulder.
He doesn’t trust her yet, but one day, he might.
***
Spencer knows he has self destructive tendencies. That’s why he’s dying in the shack, Tobias Hankel standing over him. He and his stupid self destructive tendencies have brought him here and he’s dying here. Clearly, common sense and intelligence correlate sometimes, but not always. In an even crueler twist of fate, he knows his friends are watching him huff out a final breath.
This is a stupid way to die.
He hopes J.J. is okay.
He’s never believed in the afterlife. It doesn’t fit into his scientific paradigm, and frankly, he has no idea how people believe in something without concrete evidence. He considers himself more of an agnostic than anything else.
When he goes toward the light, climbing towards the end of his tunneling vision, he thinks maybe this was the proof he needed.
***
He has a meltdown when they save him, and he can’t stop it.
Spencer doesn’t even feel like he’s inside his own body when he goes to the hospital. He bites his hands so hard he breaks the skin, leaving blood caked between the crevices of his fingers. He can’t talk, can’t comprehend the words of any of his friends, and the feeling of a needle sinking into his skin consoles him, even if it’s not Dilaudid. It’s the pain that matters right now.
“Kid? You with me?”
Spencer recognizes Morgan’s voice. He clenches his fingernails into his already bleeding hands, rocking and humming some made up tune he composed in his head while staring glassy eyed at the floor of the shack. Without being able to hear his own heartbeat, it doesn’t sound right.
He nods. He’s most effective at lying when he nods or makes noncommittal sounds.
“J.J.’s fine. A bit freaked out, but she’s gonna be okay.”
Morgan tries to touch his shoulder. Pain spreads through his body as he lets out a yelp.
“Can you talk right now?”
Spencer can’t really lie about this question without giving it away. He shakes his head miserably, folding his hands together in what he hopes is a nonverbal apology.
Morgan must understand. “It’s fine,” he says, sipping at the shitty hospital coffee they serve downstairs.
The drugs are sluicing his veins.
Morgan doesn’t say anything when Spencer curls up into a ball, mind hazy from painkillers, still humming his own made up tune.
***
Years later, Reid will realize that Gideon leaving the team is one of the best things that’s ever happened to him.
David Rossi becomes a part of their team. Spencer thanks him for getting him into criminal profiling. Rossi’s also yellow, but a darker yellow, more like sunflowers. Despite the older man’s irritation, Spencer doesn’t feel the same crushing pressure. And he doesn’t need to push back against it.
Newton’s Third Law: When one object puts force on a second object, the second object must have the same amount of force.
Reid and Rossi don’t put pressure on each other. Sure, some of Rossi’s good natured teasing can sting a tiny bit, but it isn’t mean spirited. It’s a pair of friends snarking and irritating the hell out of each other instead of molding each other to their desires.
Like a really fucked up parental relationship.
***
J.J. buys him a pair of cheap sunglasses on a case.
“I noticed you were squinting at work. I thought this might make you more comfortable.” She walks over to him and places the plastic sunglasses over his eyes before he can say anything. “I noticed that you hate the lighting in your office, so I thought, ‘hey, why not?’”
The sunglasses fit strangely on his skull.
It’s the thought that counts.
***
For not being a profiler, Garcia has a better grasp than all of them of what Spencer needs.
She doesn’t push. She listens to him pontificate about Star Trek and any other subject. She shows every bit of her strange side around him, and that makes showing his own strange side to her that much easier.
She’s the first person he tells.
It happens while watching TV. (Animal Planet. Spencer corrects factual mistakes the network makes.) A commercial for Autism Speaks comes on the television. Spencer’s fists clench. He distracts himself by shoving three Oreos in his face at once. As the narration relays devastating information about autism, Reid noticeably tenses up.
“It’s not a death sentence, you know.”
“Hm?”
Reid has the same voice he gets whenever he sees television portray schizophrenic people as homicidal monsters.
“Autism. To say that autistic children are stolen from their families by a ‘terrible disease’ is misinformed at best and dangerous at worst. Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder and it can’t be cured without killing the person. I’m autistic and I live a fulfilled, mostly happy life.”
He takes a moment to regain his composure, heat rising in his cheeks. “Sorry. Uh, I doubt you wanted to hear all of that.”
“No. I - I knew.” Garcia blinks up at him, takes off her TARDIS beanie, and places it on his head. “I’m glad you told me.”
“Why? If you already knew, why does it matter?”
“Because,” Garcia says, snagging one of the last Oreos in the package. “It tells me you trust me. You never needed to say anything, it’s just nice.”
They don’t talk about it after that.
***
The next meltdown he has in front of them is in the jet. He curls up under the blanket, rubbing his fingers over the soft fabric. He can’t get the words to arrange themselves in his head, so he hums a new made up tune, one he invented on the piano after he took up the hobby. Earlier, he bit his left thumb so hard it’s still bleeding. He’s wrapped it in a Band-Aid.
None of them press. They ask if he wants water and go silent, listening to their iPods and reading the newspaper electronically. They don’t talk, they don’t touch him or tell him to calm down.
They don’t ask about the bandaid.
Or the humming.
***
The irony is not lost on him, like it often is. An autistic agent tasked with reading other people.
But he’s good at his job. Everyone tells him that he is. Even if he can’t read people, he can still see their colors. He can hear colors in their voices, their demeanors, their actions, and yes, their body language.
***
When Spencer realizes he needs to stop apologizing for who he is, he finally decides the color he is. A foamy greenish-white. It doesn’t make sense to the team when he tells them.
It doesn’t have to.