Reid and Reid Ship Oneshots

Deaf Reid

(Sorta rushed at the end, but not the
worse thing I've written)
💛

Deafness occurs when a person is born without, or has damage to the auditory nerve system, the cochlea, or stereocilia.
The auditory nerve system is a collection of mechanisms and nerves that connect to the brainstem, and completely control your auditory perceptions.
The cochlea is a spiral shaped bone in the inner ear that plays a key role in a persons hearing, and is the housing for stereocilia. Which are hair cells that convert sound vibrations into electrical impulses, and send it to the brain.

For Reid, he was born without the proper amount of stereocilia in his ears to properly convert all sounds into understandable noises. Most things sound like muffled voices, like when you can faintly hear people talking on the other side of a wall but don't understand what they're actually saying.
That's how loud things sound to Reid; just muffled. So imagine how normal or quiet things sound. He can't hear them at all.

When he was ten, he was given hearing aids that turned his 80 dB hearing loss into 50 dB hearing loss. The style of Reid's hearing aids were full-shells. They basically filled the full shell of his outer ear. They kind of looked like wireless earbuds.
They helped, but didn't fix the main problem.
He could now hear normal conversation when right next to him, or directed at him, but he was still prominently hearing impaired. And if you were around him for a while you'd be able to tell that he didn't react to certain sounds and didn't talk much. When Reid did talk it was usually louder than appropriate. He used simple sign language on a regular basis. Like the words where?, time?, sick, no, etc., and just bodily gestures as well.

The BAU had no problem with Reid's deafness, and in just a year could completely understand the signs he used regularly. But just because the people close to him didn't find any inconvenience in it, didn't mean there wasn't ignorant and prejudice people in their line of work.

A prime example would be when the BAU were invited to assist on a case in Hampton, New Hampshire.
People were getting murdered on the counties beach via drowning, and then they'd be let out into the water.
The whole cities police force had been searching the waters for more bodies after two were found a few days before.
The BAU had been invited the day they started searching.

Reid was in charge of examining skeletons they found and getting as much information as possible on their race, age, sex, height, etc..

He never really liked the ocean though, because its waves always drowned out the voices around him, hearing aids or not. But his job was his job.

They had found two other bodies four hours into searching the surrounding shoreline. They were in a pretty terrible state; easily more than a year old. The constant erosion from the waves also broke down the bones more.
But even with the negative environmental factors, Reid was able to tell that both victims were female, and probably both between 20 and 40 years old.

By the time night had fallen, the police and search teams decided to pack up and start again tomorrow morning.

Reid furrowed his eyebrows and tapped his wrist to ask for the time from Morgan.
He looked at his wristwatch, and just turned it to Reid for him to read himself. He didn't want to talk while the police captain was giving his speech about todays progress.

Reid couldn't actually hear what he was saying, as Chief Kelly wasn't talking very loudly and didn't have a microphone to have it reach the back of the crowed, where him and Morgan were located.

"What is he saying?" Reid asked, his voice being louder than Chief Kelly's.

By his loud voice, everyone's eyes went to him, and Chief Kelly lost all attention from the crowd.

"Excuse me?" He asked, a stern look on his face, obviously annoyed that people weren't paying attention to him anymore.

Reid just raised his eyebrows in confusion. He couldn't hear what Kelly had said. He knew he was upset by his body language, but his actual words were a blur to Reid.

Morgan reached his hands up to translate 'excuse me' into sign language, but he was cut off by Chief Kelly.

"Do you think you have the right to overshadow everyone else here who put in work today?" He asked the both of them. He was trying to turn the crowd on them so he wasn't the only one mad.

"It's not like that, Chief." Morgan tried to explain.

"You didn't interrupt me." He looked from Morgan to Reid.

The genius was so confused. He couldn't hear Chief Kelly's voice. He knew he was mad at him, and that everyone was looking at him. He had heard Morgan when he tried to speak, but he was cut off by Kelly for some reason.

Morgan wasn't going to just take any of this, and he glanced to Hotch on the other side of the crowd to see if he was allowed to do anything.

Chief Kelly eyed Reid hard, waiting for a response. He then noticed something in the man's ears.
Now Reid's hearing aids were not matched to his skin tone, they were just black.

"Do you not care about the diligence of our officers?" He asked, "Why do you think you can wear earbuds and listen to music?"

Reid looked to Morgan for help, but found him silently communicating with Hotch across the crowd. He aggressively tapped his arm to get his attention.

"Help me." He signed swiftly.

"He's deaf you asshat." Morgan said sternly, "Those are his hearing aids."

Chief Kelly turned red, and awkwardly stood in front of the crowd.
"I apologize." He said, as everyone else began to laugh at both him and Reid.

Reid shuffled closer to Morgan in the sea of the laughter. He put an arm over the younger man's shoulders and joined in with everyone else's banter.