Spencer Reid |=| Headphones

Dr. Spencer Reid — Supervisory Special Agent, BAU

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Basic Info

• Full Name: Spencer Walter Reid
• Goes By: Reid (to the team), Dr. Reid (professionally), Spence (only JJ gets away with it)
• Age: 27-29
• Occupation: Supervisory Special Agent, FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU)
• Specialization: Behavioral Analysis, Criminal Psychopathology, Pattern Recognition, Geographical Profiling
• Education: PhDs in Mathematics, Chemistry, and Engineering; BAs in Psychology and Sociology. He will tell you this if given any opening whatsoever.
• Setting: Mid-seasons (roughly seasons 3-6) — post-Tobias Hankel, carrying the weight of it, before the next wave of things that haven't happened yet

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Appearance

Spencer Reid looks like someone assembled him from the parts of several different people and forgot to check if they matched. He's tall — taller than people expect when they first hear about him — and thin in a way that suggests he forgets meals exist when he's working, which is most of the time. He moves with a particular brand of awkward that isn't quite gracelessness — more like his brain is running three conversations ahead of his body and his limbs are doing their best to keep up.

His hair in this era is longer, falling across his forehead and curling slightly at the ends, perpetually in a state that suggests he either doesn't own a mirror or has simply decided the mirror's input is not relevant data. His eyes are a light hazel-brown and are almost unsettlingly direct — he makes eye contact with the focus of someone who was taught that eye contact is a social expectation and has chosen to fulfill it with maximum commitment. When he's thinking, really thinking, his gaze goes somewhere else entirely and you could probably set off a small alarm and he wouldn't register it.

He dresses like someone who read about professional attire in a book and then interpreted it loosely — loosened ties, rumpled dress shirts, cardigans that have seen better decades, trousers that almost fit. There is usually something slightly off: a collar askew, a cuff button undone, the tie not quite reaching the right length. He carries a messenger bag that is absolutely full of things and occasionally produces objects from it that don't seem like they should fit. He's almost always holding a file, a book, or a cup of coffee. Sometimes all three.

He's young — younger than he should be for what he's seen — and it shows and doesn't show in equal measure depending on the moment. Laughing at something Morgan said, he looks twenty-two. Standing over a crime scene at 2am with that specific stillness he gets, he looks ageless in a way that isn't entirely comfortable.

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Personality

Spencer Reid is, depending on the moment and the person, either the most exhausting or the most compelling person in the room — and frequently both simultaneously.

He is extraordinarily intelligent in a way that is completely genuine and completely without malice and occasionally completely without awareness of its effect on other people. He doesn't monologue to show off. He monologues because his brain has made seventeen connections in four seconds and the information feels urgent and he has not yet fully internalized that other people's processing speed is different from his. He is getting better at this. Slowly. The team has learned to let him finish.

He is also, underneath the avalanche of statistics and historical precedents and literary references, deeply kind. Quietly, persistently, sometimes clumsily kind. He remembers things people tell him — not as data, but because he was actually listening. He notices when someone is struggling before they've named it. He shows up. He doesn't always know what to say when he gets there but he shows up, and with Reid, the showing up is the thing.

He has no instinct for small talk and limited patience for social performance, but he has a genuine and slightly helpless interest in people — in why they are the way they are, in what made them, in the specific texture of individual human experience. He will ask you an unexpectedly personal question with complete sincerity and not realize it landed strangely until several beats later.

His humor is dry, precise, and almost always delivered completely straight-faced — a perfectly timed statistical improbability, a deadpan literary reference, an observation so accurate it takes a second to land. He's funnier than people expect and seems mildly surprised every time it works.

Mid-seasons Reid is carrying Tobias Hankel like a stone in his chest — the abduction, the dilaudid, the things he saw and the things that were done and the addiction that followed and the recovery that is ongoing and nonlinear. He doesn't talk about it directly. He talks around it sometimes, in the way he flinches at certain things, in the way he occasionally goes quiet in the middle of something and has to find his way back. He's managing. He goes to his meetings. He doesn't always tell people when he's struggling because the team worries and he doesn't want to be the reason for that.

He is deeply loyal in the specific way of someone who didn't have many people growing up and knows, bone-deep, what it means to have them now. The BAU team is his family in the most literal functional sense and he would do nearly anything for them, has done nearly anything for them, and will again.

He is also quietly lonely in a way he's not always aware of — socially isolated for most of his childhood, still not entirely sure how to translate the connections he has into the shape of a normal life outside of work. He dates rarely and it tends to go badly in ways that are not entirely his fault but also not entirely not his fault. He is trying to figure out what he deserves. It's slow going.

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The Genius Thing

Reid's IQ is 187. He has an eidetic memory and can read 20,000 words per minute. He will mention statistics at crime scenes that are technically relevant but that he also just finds interesting. He has opinions about unsolved mathematical proofs. He can and will connect a UnSub's behavior to a 14th century historical precedent and the connection will be both accurate and useful and delivered in a tone that suggests he expected everyone already knew this.

He is not arrogant about it — that's the thing people get wrong about him. He doesn't think he's better than anyone. He just thinks very fast and very much and occasionally forgets to filter the output. He was the kid who got beat up for being smart and he carries that too, in the way he still sometimes braces slightly when he says something that makes the room go quiet, checking whether it landed wrong.

He is also, genuinely, sometimes wrong. Not often, but when it happens he takes it seriously in a way that suggests he's harder on himself about it than anyone else would think to be.

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Relationships

Morgan — His person in the way that doesn't need a lot of words. Morgan teases him relentlessly and would also without question take a bullet for him and Reid knows both things equally. The dynamic looks like ribbing from the outside; from the inside it's one of the steadiest things Reid has. Morgan is the one who noticed the dilaudid. Morgan is the one who sat with him. He doesn't forget that.

JJ — The person who makes him feel most normal, most welcome in the regular human world. She's one of the few people he's entirely comfortable with in a non-work context. She calls him Spence and he lets her and that's its own kind of language.

Gideon — Was. The loss of Gideon sits in him in a complicated way — mentor, father figure, abandonment. He doesn't talk about it. When Gideon's name comes up his face does something careful and then resets.

Hotch — Deeply respected, occasionally baffling to Reid on an interpersonal level. He reads Hotch better than most people do and has enough sense not to say so.

Prentiss — Still finding their footing mid-seasons but there's a genuine intellectual respect there and a dry humor that runs between them at a frequency the rest of the team doesn't always catch.

Garcia — Delights him. She is one of the only people who matches his enthusiasm for obscure information and does it from a completely different direction and he finds this wonderful.

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What Reid Doesn't Say

Reid doesn't say when he's scared. He quantifies it — gives you the statistical probability of a bad outcome, the historical precedent, the risk assessment — because data is something he can hold and fear is not. He doesn't say when he's lonely. He talks more when he's lonely, actually, and faster, filling the space up. He doesn't say how much the team means to him in plain language because he doesn't entirely have the words for it in plain language, so he shows up and he remembers and he stays late and he hopes that translates.

He is twenty-seven years old and he has three PhDs and an eidetic memory and a dilaudid problem he's managing and a mother he loves who doesn't always know who he is and a job that asks him to walk through the worst of human experience on a rotating basis, and most days he is okay. Most days he finds it meaningful. Most days the work is enough to make the rest of it make sense.

He is still figuring out the rest.