polychromatic Application
[nick / name]: Kristi
[personal LJ name]: bashipforever
[other characters currently played]: Rick Castle :: Castle :: cuffmeonce
Rebecca Locke :: The Inside :: cant-just-hang
Buffy Summers :: Buffy the Vampire Slayer :: whattingawhat
Dean Winchester :: Supernatural :: dude-imbatman
Myrnin :: Morganville Vampires :: trapdoor-spider
Lucy Locke :: OC :: mghtbconcussed
[e-mail]: writer@allengames.com
[AIM / messenger]: rageiscute
[series]: Criminal Minds
[character]: Spencer Reid
[character history / background]:
http://criminalminds.wikia.com/wiki/Spencer_Reid
http://www.criminalmindsfanwiki.com/page/Spencer+Reid
[character abilities]:
Spencer is a genius. He has an IQ of 187 (reportedly higher than Einstein’s), reads 20,000 words a minute and has an eidetic memory. He claims that he doesn’t know everything but once he’s read about it or seen it he doesn’t forget it. He’s excellent at ‘talking’ someone down and has been known to do so several times on the job. He’s also a minor magician, excellent at slight of hand and excels at card games to which he implies that he cheats at. He's either telling the truth about cheating well or he's just really good at cards because he did grow up in Las Vegas. Reid is very, very good at his job. He’s an extraordinary profiler, shown to be able to put together a profile under pressure in a matter of seconds. One unsub (the one who kidnapped him) thought he could read his mind because Reid was so good at the profile he devised and at predicting future movements and motivations. He reads body language and interprets it, usually fairly accurately but people have been known to surprise him. Reid sort of has a running profile in his head for everyone he meets. He’s tactful enough and aware enough to realize that he shouldn’t inform people of this ‘internal profiling’ he does but he still does it. Spencer is very empathic which is a major reason for his adeptness at talking an unsub down. He feels empathy even for the unsubs, particularly if they are mentally unstable.
For all of his talents, Spencer isn’t a fighter. He knows how to shoot a gun and handles one reasonably well but that is where his combat skills end.
[character personality]:
He’s socially inept although not particularly shy. He likes people but if Spencer is ignorant in any areas it is socially and pop culturally. There are things he just doesn’t *get* like the implications of the song ‘X and X sitting in a tree…’. He is eternally geeky, one of the Star Trek fans that dissect the physics and science of the show. It's almost certain he prefers old Star Trek to new.
Spencer has various tics and twitches that come out when he’s nervous or uncomfortable. They aren’t debilitating in any way but he does things obsessively, repeatedly tucks his hair behind his ears; fidgets and shifts his weight and he stutters when he’s uncertain or uncomfortable. He turns into a mess around women that he’s attracted to and once told Emily that he doesn’t ask women on dates because he knows all of this about himself. When uncomfortable, he tends to revert to the familiar which for him is explaining something ridiculously above most people's brain power. He does this when talking to pretty women. Spencer isn't disillusioned in anyway about his strengths and weaknesses . Reid has grown a little and become a bit better at talking to women in general. This is due to his work and just him getting older. Spencer is only 28 years old (and a very sheltered 28 at that) so he's got some maturing and developing to do emotionally. Spencer is also afraid of the dark because of the 'sheer absence of light' and sleeps with a night light. This is incredibly metaphorical for Spencer because part of the reason he does his job is because it helps clean up the mess mental illnesses can leave behind as many of the serial killers they hunt are mentally ill in some way or another. It also allows him to help these people and thus push back the darkness with the light. It makes the possibility of his own eventual mental illness and his mother's already realized mental illness easier for him to deal with because if there is someone to push back the dark now, hopefully when he's ill someone will push back the dark for him.
He can be almost contradictory to all of these things when he knows he’s done something right or well. Spencer knows he is the smartest kid in the room therefore sometimes he’s a little cocky with his knowledge, his magic and card games. Sometimes he rushes ahead when he thinks he’s right and he doesn’t want to wait on everyone else to catch up to him because he tends to forget he's not the only kid in the room nor is he the only smart kid in the room. When he's working on something (particularly when he's reading) he has a tendency to (in JJ's words) 'go to a whole other place'. That is to say, that he gets so involved in what he's doing he tends to forget the world and the people around him except what is directly and intimately involved in the task at hand.
Spencer is in many ways a typical gifted personality. He wears his watch over his shirt sleeves regardless of whether it’s a thick sweater or a light button down and wears mismatched socks. He tends to be nervous and insecure when put in a new situation. When he’s around women he doesn’t know, he tends to bumble and stutter. He gets more relaxed as he gets more comfortable and once he is comfortable he jokes (not that everyone gets his jokes) and rambles a great deal. Particularly if it's a topic he's interested in. He's very likely to chime into a conversation unasked and uninvited to spurt random facts about whatever the topic of the conversation is.
It has been suggested but never confirmed by the writers or the show that Reid is mildly autistic. Spencer has spent his entire life as an outcast, beaten up, taunted and mocked for his intelligence and his awkwardness. He almost expects this behavior from people especially from certain types of people such as jocks. He's learned to deal with it well, barely flinching in the face of a bully and in fact when he does decide to fight back it's with his giant brain and he can tear someone down verbally, strip them to nothing and leave them whimpering. He attacks their secret weaknesses, uses the profile he's developed and exposes every detail they never wanted to see the light of day. Despite all of this, he’s friendly, forgiving and extremely sweet. Spencer truly is one of those people who don’t have a bad bone in their bodies. He doesn’t hold grudges and he has nearly no temper of any sort. He's good hearted and trusting to a fault and really believes that most people are good. They just get lost/hurt/messed up/confused along the way. That is the way he deals with the nightmares he sees and retains a certain innocence. People aren't born scary. They're made that way and he believes if they're made that way then they can be fixed at least partially. It's that hope for change that keeps him good hearted and lets him continue in his job.
Spencer is easily bored mostly because he figures things out so quickly. His brain moves along at a million miles an hour so he needs a job that provides him with a different challenge every day. The BAU provides this for him. The same idea applies to people in a sense. He likes people whom he can't figure out and present a challenge to him. He is absolutely irrevocably proud of, admiring and unembarrassed of his mother.
His first instinct is never to fight. He will always choose reasoning and negotiating and Spencer is reasonably afraid of death. His mother is a paranoid schizophrenic which is a genetic disease. Spencer lives very much in fear that one day that he will end up like his mother even though he’s shown no sign of mental illness thus far. He tells the team at one point he knows what it is like to be afraid of your own mind. He really is a Momma’s boy because his father left when he was around 7 or 8. He is absolutely irrevocably proud of, admiring and unembarrassed of his mother. He often prefers the company of women to men. This isn't an issue of sexuality although Reid is shown to be straight in canon and likes women in a sexual way. This is simply a matter of familiarity. It also relates a little back to men are the most likely to have bullied him when he was younger at least directly. He is also extremely comfortable in the company of the mentally ill and unstable. This is because his mother raised him and has been sick his entire life. He makes a statement at one time in the show that his mother stopped taking her medication when she was pregnant with him. This implies that she was diagnosed and ill enough to be on medication before he was even born.
He thinks of most things in terms of logic and scientific explanation, breaking them down mathematically if possible. He often ‘over explains’ things, realizing only when people begin to glaze over that they really just wanted the short explanation. His brilliance is his identity and when he doesn’t know something, it makes him uncomfortable. Most of the time, Spencer manages to neither be patronizing nor superior but on occasion he does jump to make decisions for people because he thinks he is smarter and knows better.
Spencer is one of those little, skinny, intelligent guys with balls of steel. He has bravery in spades. Several times in canon he puts himself in a dangerous situation because he's trying to do the best thing possible for the unsub. He has made himself a human shield for sniper fire and he's walked into a room with an armed bomb in an attempt to try and talk to the man the bomb was strapped to down. When playing body guard for a family member of a victim he tackled the guy to the ground without hesitation when an armed man started shooting and got shot in the leg for his effort. If he thinks someone can be saved he is the most stubborn, toughest little shit you've ever met. He will buck rules, conventions, his own safety and comfort in order to help someone get out of a situation less broken than they were before. This seems to contradict his fear of death but the death he's really afraid of is one that doesn't matter. He doesn't want to die in an elevator accident. He wants to die helping someone. It doesn't have to be a big death or a grand one, it just has to matter.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: The Internet is Forever 5X22
[journal post]:
[The video shows Reid poking at the device, pushing buttons. His brow is furrowed and his bangs are definitely in his eyes. There seems to be a slight tic, his eyebrows knitting together and then relaxing repeatedly, as he attempts to figure out what's going on here.]
I-I can't seem to figure out--
[He tucks back hair that's really no longer long enough to go behind his ear then clears his throat]
My name is Doctor Spencer Reid. I'm a Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI. I've been trying to determine a little about the City here. I'm not sure how we all arrived here.
[third person / log sample]:
We've taken the victim into custody and let the abuser go free. I don't see that as much of a win.
He’s quiet on the jet, turns down card games with Hotch that he knows he’ll win. He’s got headphones on but he can feel Morgan’s eyes on him. The rest of the team knows there’s something wrong because he’s taking entirely too long to turn the pages of the book he’s not really reading. He can’t stop thinking about Adam. He was so stupid and so slow; if he’d been faster, smarter, better Adam could have been saved. He could have saved Adam. Instead there’s a missing boy that may never find his way back.
“It happens sometimes,” Hotch says, drawing Reid out of his thoughts and his eyes away from the book. Reid raises an eyebrow and points to the headphones even though he can hear Hotch perfectly over Mozart’s symphony.
“That’s part of the job, Reid. It’s part of the chase. We lose some, it’s inevitable.”
Reid sighs and pushes his headphones off one ear. His fingers flutter over his hair, smoothing hair that’s already tucked back. “I didn’t have to lose this one. My mother is a paranoid schizophrenic. I should have recognized the mental illness sooner. I should have-what use is everything I know if I don’t know enough?”
“You take everything you learned in this case, plus everything you know and maybe next time it is enough,” Hotch responds. He leans forward, his elbows going to his knees and Reid knows he’s not going to let this go.
“And everyone you lose in the meantime?” Spencer asks quietly. “How do you deal with that?”
“By realizing how many people you’re going to save,” Hotch answers. “Morgan told me you’re keeping score. He doesn’t think healthy. I think it’s…normal but you’re leaving out a column. This isn’t a traditional scoreboard. You’ve got the people you’ve lost, the people you’ve saved and all the potential ones. It’s a mathematical equation. X represents the number of people you’re going to save. The whole thing is unfinished and unresolved unless you figure in X.”
Spencer’s brow furrowed and his face scrunched up in thought. Within seconds that had smoothed out to a faint smile. Hotch returned the smile and leaned back.
“Should be landing in a little while,” he says.
Reid nods and slips his headphones back on. “Yeah, it’ll be nice to be home.”
There's an order to decompression:
A hot bath.
A glass of milk.
Soft sleep pants and a worn Cal Tech tee shirt.
A little bit of Mozart and a letter to his mom about their latest adventure.
He embellishes the heroic parts, emphasizes the logic and the order he wields like sword and shield. He glosses over the black of the villains to paint them in shades of gray so that the entire case takes on the patina of the fifteenth century tales his mother is so fond of. The process is as much a catharsis for him as it is entertainment for a woman who's mind has more soft edges than sharp corners. His handwriting smooths out turning from a cramped scrawl to a loose, rolling scribble. He signs it, folds the letter meticulously and puts it in an envelope. Once it's sealed, stamped and safe inside his messenger bag, Reid finally crawls into bed. His empty glass of milk sits in the dish drainer, clean and waiting for juice in the morning. His hair is still damp from his bath and the apartment is utterly quiet, cloaked in shadows courtesy of the nightlight he never sleeps without.
Winding down is a process for Reid, as are most things. He's vigilant about it because an eidetic memory means he can't ever not see the things a case presents to him. The terror and pain on the faces will never soften with time into something more palatable. The torture will never be less violent. He can't use family members, nameless strangers or online worlds to slip away to a place that isn't as horrible as the one he works in. The only way he can push back the dark in his head is to combat it with the light. He doesn't have the brawn that Derek does nor the social skills that JJ and Hotch have. He doesn't know how far to push, how aggressive to be with someone like Rossi. Reid has to use math, chemistry, psychology and every bit of knowledge his can cram into his brain to save people from the dark.
It's all he can do. Sometimes it's enough and sometimes he feels like he's back in high school, curled into the fetal position against the kicks of a kid older and stronger than him. There was always an end and that's what he reminds himself. Tuck your chin, protect your head. They'll make a mistake. They'll make a mistake and when they do, they're all yours. When they do, you can push back. Reid has been a victim and he's smart enough to realize that if he'd been a different person, had less empathy, been a little slower or had a parent that didn't care, he could be in the shoes of the guy that murdered women. He could have cracked under the pressure of a paranoid schizophrenic mother or the abuse a twelve year old prodigy in a public Las Vegas high school endures. He could have a grudge against jocks that drives him to torture and kill. He could want to see all pretty girls disfigured as revenge for mocking him; for never seeing him; for never looking beyond the stuttering and horn rimmed glasses.
“There but for the grace of God,” he murmurs to himself. The truth is, Spencer could never be that person. He might be a victim but he could never hurt someone else. That's not the person his mother raised. That's not the person he was ever born to be and anyone who meets him knows it.
Sleep finally comes, creeping up on him and scattering his thoughts. It probably won't be dreamless and those dreams probably won't be pleasant but in a way they drive him as well. Somewhere there's a place where nightmares don't haunt him and his head isn't full of scenes from a real life horror movie. That place is just a few more cases away; another person saved; another perpetrator put away so that he's not a danger to himself or to anyone else. The saved column will outweigh the lost column. Real life will resemble the adventures his mother loves hearing from him. Everyone will live happily ever after.
And Spencer Reid will have to find another form of dragon to slay with math and logic; stuttering words and chemistry magic. That day is a long way off so for now he'll save the damsels, banish the dragons and hope the monsters that get away can be caught one day.