Prompt: "Hey, I'm with you, okay? Always."

As usual, I own nothing and nobody.

Well, it took her long enough.

He looks in the rear-view mirror of his LAPD sedan, watching as his partner shoots him an angry glare from her Cadillac. It's probably deserved, to be fair to her. After all, he's the one who up and disappeared from work without explanation this morning.

So maybe he was bored at OPS and decided to check the LAPD response calls (like he is supposed to do but rarely does anymore). Maybe he recognized a name that made his face flush and his blood run cold at the same time. Maybe he came up with a bullshit excuse to drop some paperwork off at headquarters and didn't return to work or call to check in. Maybe he'd been parked adjacent to the house where the incident occurred, staring back and forth between the address on the police report and the street number on the mailbox, hoping that it would somehow give him inspiration for a reason why an NCIS Liaison LAPD Detective would need to follow up on this report. Maybe it's a good thing that his inspiration has run dry.

Most definitely this is a huge mistake - in his mind, no good can come from this meeting. And now that Kensi is here and approaching the passenger side door at break-neck speed, she'll provide the voice of reason he needs to drive away and never look back. After she yells at him for worrying everybody (but really her), of course.

Unlocking the doors, he patiently waits for the verbal lashing he knows he is due. But as she slides into the car next to him, the only sound he's greeted with is a soft grunt as she falls into the seat. Silence from Kensi? Not good.

"I'm sorry if I worried you," Deeks says, getting the apology out of the way.

Kensi purses her lips, and maybe she doesn't look as mad as he originally thought. "If you knew I'd be worried, why did you disappear on me?"

"I don't know." He shrugs. "I think that every step of the way, I thought I'd reach a point where I realized I should head back. And the next thing I knew, I was sitting here staring at a mailbox."

She looks at the mailbox, then studies his face. "It's a rather basic mailbox."

"It's pretty ugly, actually."

Deeks glances at her hand, knowing his partner-in-everything so well that he could have timed the exact moment she would curl her fingers around his fist. He also knows she has to be more aware of the situation than she's letting on. He'd turned his cell phone off at the police station (another questionable move on his part), so how the hell else could she have found him? But she wouldn't make any assumptions or jump to conclusions. For her, the real story will have to come from the source. "So," she says, squeezing his hand. "Why are we sitting here admiring this ugly mailbox?"

He clears his throat and hands her the police report, scratching his chin when she takes the papers from him. Her eyes scan the report, looking for anything that seems significant, but…it's all boring and straightforward. "What am I missing?"

"You're looking too hard," he murmurs, shaking his head. "Elizabeth Brandel called in a B&E at 9:17 p.m. last night after she returned home from visiting a friend. Approximately $200 of damage was done to the house," he pauses and points to a boarded up window. "And an estimated $500 worth of possessions were stolen. There have been a string of break-ins in the area lately, but that's not uncommon here. It's under investigation."

She speaks slowly. "Brandel."

"It's not a common name, no," he acknowledges. "After Hetty told me about my father's death, I finally did some research on my own, ya know, to see if he had any other children or…I don't know." He nods his head in the direction of the house with the boring mailbox. "She's his widow."

"Oh." Kensi places the police report in the console between them. "Does she know who-"

"I have no idea," he interrupts. "Have I ever met her? No. Does she know that her dead husband had an estranged child? Probably. Do I think she would know who I was if I walked up to her front door and knocked? Absolutely." His avoidance of her curious gaze since she joined him is getting harder and harder for him to maintain. Truthfully, he's not even sure why he hid this from her in the first place, or why he's still having trouble talking about it now.

"Deeks, look at me."

"Yeah?" He sighs and tilts his head, smiling ever so slightly at her very fake stern expression. No matter how deep her frown is, she can't hide the softness in her eyes when she looks at him.

"Be honest with me, and yourself. What did you expect to accomplish by coming here?"

Good question, one that he's still trying to figure out the answer to. "Um." He pouts his bottom lip, contemplating how much he really wants to burden her with at the present time. Like the fact that it's not just any old house they're sitting in front of, it's the house he lived in until his mother took him and moved away. Or that he's curious about whether or not it still looks the same on the inside, that he wonders if his height carvings are still on the closet door-frame, or if it's possible there might be a picture of his father or possibly even him still in that house. He really doesn't want to tell her that his most vivid memory here is watching blood cover the scratched wooden floors while he trembled and cried. Those are a lot of words and a lot of emotions that he thought he was ready to face, but maybe he's just not yet.

When he fails to answer, she quietly clears her throat. "Do you want to just wait a little longer?"

"This is just…" Really dumb, he thinks. They should be at work, saving lives or disarming bombs or whatever insane shit is on their agenda for today. He closes his eyes and berates himself for going lone wolf that morning. He and Kensi are so beyond these kinds of secrets in their relationship. "Ugh," he grumbles.

"Or we can come back sometime later, when you're ready," she offers gently.

He raises an eyebrow. "We?"

"Yes, we." She offers a small smile and a soft squeeze to the back of his neck. "Hey, I get it. Sometimes you want answers to something you haven't even figured out the questions for yet. But no matter what, I'm here with, okay? Always." She tugs on an unruly curl that's tickling her hand, a small attempt to lighten the mood in the car.

It works. Deeks blows out a big puff of air and turns the key in the ignition. "I thought you were supposed to be my voice of reason and yell at me for pulling a Callen," he jokes.

"Well, I am still your voice of reason. Go back to work." Scrunching her nose playfully, she opens the door and leaves him alone again to return to her vehicle.

Casting one more look at his old house, he puts the car in drive and leaves the memories behind him once again. Next time he'll be ready to ask if his father ever spoke of him, if he'd voiced any regrets, or if he'd straightened his life out before meeting his maker.

Next time he'll be ready to hear the answers to all of those questions, even if the answer is no.