Author's Note: My story 'The Undubbed Crime' has been on hiatus for a while now, and to get back into writing it, I wrote this. Then I realized a) it was 2 in the morning and I needed sleep and b) it could function well on its own outside the story. It can be friendshippy or more. Whatever you want. I'm too tired to care.

I own nothing.

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Being with Ingrid is different than partnering with Wayne.

Long and short of it? She's got history like I do. We've both hopped fences and hidden in bushes. Wayne could never get what that meant. Ingrid does. She remembers how it feels to know you didn't do nothing wrong and get busted anyway. She remembers how to lie so that no one sees her stress.

But that's not even what makes it different.

Neither of us are letting it drag us down. Yes, we may have fallen. But we have done so by our own free will. I could have ignored Wayne, done my time, and kept going. Ingrid could've just taken her punishment and moved on. We didn't.

We faced it.

As time goes on we're facing a lot of things I never thought we'd come up against. Kids who have broken rules but with good intentions, valid reasons the system doesn't want to hear. Kids whose only focus is the past, and who throw it in our faces. Adults who tell us this and that, trying to distract us from the fact that they're in on the corruption. Everything we never wanted to face has come up front and center.

Ingrid understands when I don't wanna talk about who I used to be. She'll also make me own up to it, though.

Now I gotta do the same for her.

I don't know why she did it. I don't want to know. But we have to face up to it before someone goes down because of it. I know what it's like to have things you thought were forgotten bite you in butt. But if that thing doesn't bite her now, she'll be too far gone to function later.

I'm her partner. More than that, I'm her friend.

She may be avoiding me right now. She's never done that before. But since I'm avoiding her just as much, I can't say anything. One of us needs to step forward and get our act together. The school depends on us but more importantly we depend on us.

So I guess I'm gonna go talk to her.

If only I had the words…