Disclaimer: Don't own anything. Not even a proper sense for English grammar and vocabulary. I'm practically learning the language by reading fanfiction. So don't sue, don't judge - just offer to beta for me ;o)

Prolog

At first it seemed like any other case they had wrapped the last three years.

In fact it seemed easier – and maybe a little less important.

The case wasn't about drugs sold by ten-year-olds, weapons at school or discrimination on campus. It was simply about some skater kids that liked to paintbrush walls. Okay, so they signed bridges, public transports and whole warehouses. It cost a lot to repaint the facades, trains and buildings that were coloured with tags and not so tasteful pictures and flames. And because the kids worked on such a big scale, the mayor was under a lot of pressure. The Jump Street program was asked to identify the unknown artists and the city of Vancouver wanted to make an example by judging them.

And it went the foreseen way.

At least for a while: the cops infiltrated some schools in the area in which most of the incidents had occurred, and four weeks later Tom Hanson and Doug Penhall hang out with a group of teenagers that they suspected to be part of the random artistic adventures. The night they were asked to meet their "friends" at two o'clock in the morning in front of a well known supermarket, they had a total of five police cars following them. The minute the teenagers would start their work, the squad would move in. Caught in the act. Finis.

But it didn't happen that way.

The question that Officer Tom Hanson would ask himself more often than any other question in his whole life would be: what the fuck went wrong? Was there anyway he could have changed his fate?

Maybe. He could have waited longer for the backup. But Doug, his partner in crime and law, had already flashed his badge. It seemed like the right thing to do, and he really didn't think the kids were THAT dangerous. They sprayed on walls, for goddamn sake. They hadn't deliberately harmed anyone. They had spent four weeks on a case, that dealt with vandalism. Okay, the teenagers had professionalized the whole thing by bringing scaffolds to reach the visual more effective higher ground. But it was still vandalism.

Tom had not even wanted in on this case.

It seemed unfair to him to bust some kids that blew off some steam by painting dirty jokes on public property. How could something like that move so high on the list of priorities on the to-do-list of the mayor, when there were still drug victims dying on highschool toilet floors and weapons circulating on the streets that could decide the war in some third world country?

Ever since he had come back from prison Hanson had been thinking about quitting. Not just the Jump Street program, but the whole being-a-cop-thing.

He had been thinking too much about his motives for becoming a cop in the first place. Was he just doing something his father would have been proud of? Could he really believe in this job - that he was part of something good? After all he'd seen and had happened to him in the last four years he wasn't so sure anymore. He had even talked to Doug about his doubts. He was already thinking about different ways to make money.

Maybe he was not focused enough when he flashed his badge. Maybe he was too used to the reaction he had received the many times the two of them had done this before. The teenagers usually broke down – or they ran. Nobody had ever turned around and sprayed one of the officers in the face.

Maybe that was why, when exactly that happened, Officer Tom Hanson did not manage to close his eyes before it hit him.