Work Text:
Aaron has a working theory that autistic and adjacent traits are, despite the typical assumptions, beneficial to profiling.
It isn’t difficult to see: above average visual and structural thinking; a tendency towards a more analytical approach; better attention to detail; a natural ability to notice patterns and good recall. There’s a considerable overlap in the symptoms of autism and the job description and although it might be a co-incidence, there’s a reason why.
Not that it’s useful with a sample size of one. If he asked, che imagines Reid would be happy to help, would know more about it than he does, really, but two isn’t much of an improvement. He’d have to tell Reid. Reid, who, with a quiet sort of courage didn’t care what people thought about him, had joked that his autism was statistically the most average thing about him.
He isn’t naïve enough to think anti-discrimination laws do much beyond a legal sense; and even that is tenuous. Just because they can’t outright fire or demote him for it doesn’t stop them finding a minor reason to assign him to some desk job where he’s got no influence on anything that matters, and if that happens immediately after they know he’s – about him, that’s just a co-incidence.
At least unfair dismissal is clear and concrete to fight about: Aaron is far more concerned with the day-to-day annoyances. The subtle shift in treatment, pushing him further from capable and leader and trusted. His team aren’t immune to those unconscious biases.
Hail clatters off the jet over the low rumble of the engines (Rolls-Royce, BR700, new – he’s not obsessed with planes like he was as a kid but he’s got more than a passable interest in them) and Aaron tilts his head back against the seat. There’s a dull ache behind his eyes. He’s always had a harder time tolerating sound than light.
The others are talking. He isn’t following the conversation but he hears the easy rhythm to it, back-and-forth, and their laughter, and something in his chest twinges.
Because as much as autism is helpful, Aaron does wonder what it’d be like to not have to think so hard about a mundane chat; to just know what to say with the same instinct everyone else has. He has his expectations, his framework, memorised the euphemisms and expressions and flow of it all, and he can stitch it all together into something passable.
(Aaron had wanted to be a lawyer long before his father had shoved him in that direction. Wanted it since the first time he’d sat up in the gallery at the county courthouse, too short to see over the railings properly, and what he heard made sense to him like nothing else has since.)
And sure, he’s at an advantage when most people are thrown off their guard, but profiling teaches them to be. They notice odd body language from a gut instinct, he recognises it because he’s learnt what they mean, notices when the emotion on someone’s face doesn’t match. He catches out odd word choice and patterns based on his scripts. That doesn’t mean others are worse because their hint comes from instinct.
And it’s not as if he lacks it entirely. Just doesn’t have it to the same extent.
Normal people can catch up with him; Aaron can only mimic their communication – and he does it well, granted – but it’s superficial. He understands it, that’s never been the issue. The toll it takes on him outside work doesn’t feel worth it.
They’re flying into sheets of rain and the engines roar as he digs a Tylenol out of the blister pack in his bag and swallows it dry. In his jacket pocket, Aaron presses the pad of his thumb over a tarnished coin, feels the embossing dig in, and in having spare change on him he’s got plausible deniability for one of very few stims subtle enough to go unnoticed, let alone not being clocked as stimming at all.
Because if they notice stimming, they notice autism. Something weird to the average person is intriguing to profilers as sharks go for blood, and Aaron hasn’t put the effort into blending in just to let it fall apart.
His head is tight with a band of pain from temple to temple and they’re hours out from touching down in Quantico. It must show on his face.
“All right?” Dave asks quietly.
Aaron nods. “Just tired.”