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Spencer knows that there’s a difference between the ability to read social cues versus the ability to successfully interact with other people based on those social cues. Spencer knows that he is good at neither of these things; he isn’t fluent in the nuances of human body language that everyone else grew up understanding. He’s not fluent, but he does know how to translate. Spencer can interpret what other people’s social cues mean, but he can’t figure out how he’s supposed to respond to them.
Gideon seems to have the same problem as Spencer, except he doesn’t see it as a problem. For him, it probably isn’t. Spencer has seen how Gideon’s lack of social graces benefit him in the BAU. The man is unstoppable. He’ll do whatever he thinks has to be done, no matter what other people think of him while he’s doing it. Gideon never feels the need to explain himself, even though he has to know that his thought process is something of a mystery to his team.
Spencer wishes he could have Gideon’s blaring confidence. Instead, he trips over his own tongue attempting to explain and justify every single case-related thought that crosses his mind, and he’s absolutely terrible at continuing to do things that other people tell him not to. He has to follow the letter of the law, because he always ends up misinterpreting its spirit. Spencer longs for the time when he’ll have enough experience, enough respect to his name, that nobody tries to second-guess his plans. He’s tired of explaining every idea over and over to people who don’t want to hear his step-by-step walkthroughs.
Gideon never explains, he just does. He acts on his fine-tuned instincts, consequences be damned. And his instincts are almost always right. He’s so confident when he’s profiling. Spencer looks up to his unit chief in a way that words can’t fully describe.
Gideon must know this. He wouldn’t be a very good profiler if he didn’t. Spencer knows that Gideon knows, but he still tries to keep his admiration for the other man under lock and key. Gideon isn’t vain; if anything, he dislikes being complimented. When uniforms congratulate him on a case well solved, he smiles awkwardly and tells them that they helped. That’s it.
Awkward. Spencer knows all the meanings of that word all too well. Socially awkward (inept), physically awkward (clumsy), uncooperative, difficult, abnormal, embarrassing, ungainly... Stop it, Spencer. Nobody wants a human thesaurus around. The voice in his head sounds vaguely like one of his high school bullies, although it could be anyone, really.
Spencer is awkward, and he’s made painfully aware of that fact every day. He looks awkward (abnormal), talks awkwardly (embarrassing), moves awkwardly (clumsy); even his handwriting is spidery and uncomfortable-looking when he fills out paperwork. He’s always trying to move his pen as fast as possible, trying to make it keep up with the words crashing around in his head. His handwriting is much more relaxed when he writes letters to his mother.
Spencer is awkward. He knows it, he doesn’t like it, and he tries to minimize it.
Gideon is awkward, too.
It takes Spencer a while to realize this. At first, he thinks that the long silences peppered throughout Gideon’s conversations are a result of the respect he commands. As he spends more time around the man, however, Spencer begins to realize that not everyone finds him so easy to talk to.
People think Gideon is standoffish, for reasons that Spencer can’t understand. They also think that he’s confrontational, which does make sense; the part that doesn’t make sense is why that makes him hard to talk to. Most important, people think Gideon is awkward, so they generally avoid talking to him unless they feel up to it.
Spencer thinks he knows why. Gideon never explains himself, never gives anyone an insight into how he thinks, so nobody knows how he interprets their conversations with him. He speaks a different language than everyone else. Sure, the two languages may be mutually intelligible, like Russian and Belarusian, but they’re not the same. The alphabet is the same, but the letters make different sounds; some words are the same, but the stressed syllable is different; the grammar looks the same on the surface, but the nuances are wide and varied and go way beyond the comprehension ability of someone who only speaks the mutually intelligible language.
If Gideon speaks Spanish, and the majority of the BAU speaks French, that means Spencer speaks Italian, or maybe Galician. Their languages are adjacent to those of the rest of the team, but they are also fundamentally different. Spencer still hasn’t decided if that’s a bad thing, if he should put in all the time and effort to become fluent in French and perfect his accent and erase all traces of his own language from his life.
He knows that Gideon would never do that. He would never learn to speak a new language when the language he currently speaks is mostly mutually intelligible with his team’s language. He’d call it a waste of time and effort. Maybe he’d be right.
Spencer finds it easy to talk to Gideon. He tells his unit chief things that, before joining the BAU, he only would have told his mother. That’s a good thing, Spencer tells himself. It’s less of a burden on her... But the burden of listening to Spencer is still out there, just not entirely borne by his mom anymore. Now, Gideon shares the load. A little. Not too much.
Spencer tells Gideon that he’s autistic. He knows it’s a fact; he was diagnosed at a very young age, before his dad left. Looking back, Spencer is surprised that everyone around him trusted an autistic child to be the caretaker for a paranoid schizophrenic woman. People probably just didn’t care about either of them.
It just slips out one day, on the jet. Spencer and Gideon are playing chess, and Spencer thinks he might be winning, for once. They’re chatting to pass the time, because Spencer’s brain keeps yelling at him to make sounds with his mouth no matter how annoyed the people around him look. Thankfully, the only person around him currently is Gideon. That’s good. Gideon can put up with Spencer for long periods of time, such as on flights from Alaska to Virginia.
Spencer’s been spewing information out of his mouth at what has to be some kind of record speed, and somehow he’s also winning the chess game. He’s happy, which is an odd feeling after a case. Usually, he’s curled up in the window seat with a book, trying to distract himself by falling into a fictional word; or, more rarely, he’s sprawled out on the couch, completely drained. But tonight, he’s doing neither of those. He feels pretty okay this time.
Somewhere in the avalanche of words tumbling out of his mouth, Spencer mentions his neurotype. Upon hearing this, Gideon barely blinks, nods, and moves his queen.
“Check.”
Spencer stops talking abruptly. He squints at the chessboard, trying to figure out where he let his opponent gain the upper hand. He can’t see it now, but he’s confident he will later.
He sighs. “How long have you been playing this game, Gideon?” Spencer asks, moving one of his pieces out of the way of Gideon’s last remaining knight. It’s a strange move to make, but he hopes it will at least buy him time. There’s no way out of this one.
“Checkmate,” Gideon replies, snatching Spencer’s pieces off the board. He lines them all up from largest to smallest and smiles down at them. Then he locks eyes with Spencer and raises his eyebrows, as if saying, Look what I accomplished, while you only took four of my pieces. Spencer laughs.
“Statistically speaking, I’m going to beat you eventually. After a certain number of games, I’ll learn your strategies and be able to react differently.”
Gideon’s eyebrows rise even higher. “But I’ll also be picking up on your strategies, Reid. Think about that.”
Spencer does think about that. He doesn’t spend much time on it, though, because his question remains unanswered. “How long have you played this?” he asks.
“Oh,” Gideon shrugs, blowing air out of the side of his mouth as he thinks, “about fifty years, give or take. I learned when I was a kid. Been a hobby of mine ever since.”
Spencer recalls his own childhood hobbies: reading, and reading in other languages. Hyperlexia is to blame for that. Hyperlexia, combined with autism that gave him a special interest in words and a brain capable of processing twenty thousand words per minute, was basically designed to give him a lifelong love of reading.
“Rematch?”
Gideon said something. Spencer shakes his head briefly to clear it, but even after doing that he can’t remember what was said.
“Sorry, what was that?”
Gideon smiles. “Rematch? Or do you want to stick your nose in one of those Russian books for the next hour?” he asks. Spencer smiles back at the other man and considers the two options he’s been offered. He can either play again, or he can call it a night and crack open his Russian copy of Anna Karenina. Gideon sounds like he’d be okay with either course of action.
“Let’s go again,” Spencer decides. He begins setting up his pieces on the board, and after a moment Gideon does the same. Their game proceeds normally for a while, but something feels wrong. Spencer can’t tell for sure, but Gideon seems preoccupied, like not all of his attention is focused on the chess match.
“What are you thinking about?”
Gideon doesn’t answer right away, which is fine. Spencer is used to the pauses the other man takes to gather his thoughts and assemble them into words that make sense. He knows that Gideon doesn’t really think in words, so translating from the language of his thoughts to the language of his mouth is hard. Spencer is the opposite. He only thinks in words, and his thoughts are more like lines of text flowing across his mental eye than sounds he hears in his head. Maybe he talks so much because there’s usually no conversion to be made from thought to speech.
Gideon finally speaks. "I’m thinking about you, Reid."
“What about me?” Spencer replies. He tries to stay calm, but his stomach is full of dread. What if Gideon isn’t okay with one of his agents being autistic? Is he doubting Spencer’s field abilities? Is he considering asking Spencer to transfer? “Are you thinking about the fact that I have autism?” Spencer asks, desperately trying to fill the silence that has suddenly grown between them. He’s trying to stop himself from imagining all the horrible possible outcomes of the turn this conversation has taken.
“We have autism.”
Oh.
And then, a few moments later, Duh.
“Thank you for telling me,” Spencer says. He knows that reply is woefully inadequate, totally underselling the emotions he feels, but it’s the best he can manage. Spencer smiles at Gideon, and his hands begin to bounce up and down on his thighs. That’s a stim, that’s an autistic thing, and he can do it around Gideon now because Gideon knows. He knows because he’s autistic too.