Emily Prentiss x Reader Oneshots

Homesick

The city was sweltering. It was a heat unlike one you had ever felt before. Hot steam blasted up through the grates in the sidewalk as subway cars screeched past, hurrying towards their next destination. The sunshine was bouncing between buildings that stretched nearly to the clouds, trapping you in a bubble of humid, sticky heat with millions of other people also dripping sweat and rushing to make it to their next reprieve of air conditioning and ice-cold water.

As you made it to your building, you tried not to look down the block at the men sprawled on the sidewalk that always catcalled you whenever you chanced walking past. By the advice of your neighbors and some of the local workers, you steered clear of the little gang, having heard that they were up to no good. So long as you stayed out of their way and didn't interact with them, everyone assured you that you would be just fine. That didn't make wanting to come home any easier, though.

You had never been this far away from home before and certainly had never lived somewhere even a fraction of the size of New York City. But this place was your dream, this place felt like home. Well, at least the parts of it that didn't make your parents worry themselves into a tizzy. It had been less than a week since your dad and best friend dropped you off in your tiny two-bedroom apartment alone, your new roommate not moving in for at least 6 more days, to get used to the sounds and anxieties of living in the greatest city in the world.

With a little over a week until you were scheduled to start classes for grad school, no job, and no friends yet, things were getting pretty lonely in your apartment. Sometimes in the middle of the day, for no apparent reason, your sadness would hit you like a ton of bricks. It was like all of a sudden your entire body would slow to a halt, your chest would get tight, and tears would sting at your eyes. When this would happen, all you really wanted was some attention, some love, and a reminder that you were not alone.

But you had no idea how to ask for any of that.

You and Emily were no stranger to distance with her job. You met in Chicago when you were presenting research at a conference, and she was working on one of her first assignments with the FBI after graduating from Yale. You were still in undergrad just a couple of hours outside the city and she would use her free time to come visit you or to pick you up from the train station and bring you to her apartment. But between classes and her job, sometimes the most that the two of you could manage were FaceTime calls. And once the pandemic hit? It was a damn near miracle when you got to see each other. You two were regularly tested and were super cautious but sometimes the anxiety and guilt were too much and you couldn't bring yourself to sneak off to the city to see her, let alone go against the rules and sneak her onto your closed campus.

When you graduated this past spring, no one told you that Emily would be coming and you nearly cried as flung yourself into her arms upon seeing her, giving all the regulations a big fuck you to kiss her long and hard. She ended up coming home with you for a couple of weeks but eventually had to return to Chicago. Towards the end of the summer, she was offered a new position in DC, one that would allow her to go back to the academy to study profiling. Because of this move, she couldn't help you with your move and you had no clue when you would see her again. DC was closer to New York than Chicago, but she still felt an ocean away.

With these pangs of sadness and homesickness came the desire to pull away from the people you loved. All you craved was attention and care but your body was screaming at you to isolate, to shut down, to be alone. So when Emily got so busy with her training program that she hadn't reached out in a couple of days, you knew in the back of your mind that you couldn't call her. You just knew that no matter how bad you were feeling, how sad, how lonely, you wouldn't dare disrupt Emily's new normal, Emily's new life. You just could not bring yourself to even try to take up space, no matter how much you needed it.