#gideon naturally tends towards distance and being quite aloof but

[frankiebirds]

this scene makes me need to lay down. goddddd.

sometimes i get the sense that reid is more attached to gideon than gideon is to reid. obviously they both serve as surrogates for the family member each is estranged from (gideon is estranged from his son and reid is estranged from his dad) but.

you know. reid clings to gideon, not physically but emotionally, and i think a lot of his wellbeing at the start of the series relies on gideon's presence. gideon almost certainly knows the most about reid out of anyone on the team—i don't think canon ever says that reid has told gideon about diana, but i would imagine he has—and i think reid feels understood by him in a way he doesn't by other people, even compared to the rest of the team who (mostly) try their best. i think he also tends to try to be as good and deserving as possible of gideon's presence, since he definitely at least partially feels like his father left because he wasn't good enough.

on the flipside, while gideon definitely sees reid as a son, he's...not the best dad. i think we see him repeating a lot of the mistakes that drove a wedge between him and stephen with reid, and i think that had mandy patinkin stayed on, we would have gotten a larger parallel there. he holds him at arms length, trying not to get too close, although he definitely cares about him more than he lets on and the mask slips sometimes, like this moment and on the plane after ldsk.