Hank will never forget his first case as a homicide detective.

He was greener than cut grass back then, but from the moment he walked into that squad room in street clothes with a badge hung around his neck and sat down at his desk, he thought he was top of the food chain. Running with the big dogs. He was bulletproof, unstoppable.

Looking back, of course, he realizes he was primed for a long fall from a tall horse, but those first few days on the job were magic.

Then the Captain–Grayson back then, Renard didn’t show up till Hank had a few more years under his belt–slid a file across his desk, a homicide. Opening that file was the beginning of the end for his bright-eyed illusions of invincibility, not that he knew it then. He was gonna be a hundred percent closer. Maybe the youngest captain in Portland history, or maybe a career detective whose brilliant solves became the stuff of local legend. Either way, he figured in five years or less he’d be running the joint.

Hank hates to admit it, but he was a cocky little shit once upon a time.

The first picture should have brought him slamming back to earth. The victim was a young caucasian male, mid-twenties, found beheaded in the woods. The head hadn’t been recovered. The lurid bloody stump where the neck was severed seemed unreal in the photo, like a movie prop. He was floating too high to be touched by the tragedy of it: a young guy, barely out of college, murdered and disfigured like something out of a bad 70s horror movie.

It should have sobered him, but it just jazzed him up more. His first case, and it was a doozy. If he closed this, he would be a goddamn instant hero.

But he didn’t close it, and at the end of the day he didn’t feel like a hero. He felt like a fraud. He was supposed to serve and protect and he couldn’t even close his first goddamn case.

He almost quit, right then. He almost said “fuck it” and went back to school to be an EMT.

He’s still not sure why he didn’t. He just…couldn’t leave a thing undone. So he stayed, and learned, and became a damn good detective. A part of him hoped that maybe someday he’d solve that first case after all.

And nearly a decade and several revelations about the nature of the world they really live in later, looking down at a body without its head, with Trubel and Nick outside being questioned and a bloody machete being bagged as evidence…Hank thinks he might finally know the answer.