Chad Shelten smiled dutifully and joined in raising his beer bottle in a toast to the gray-haired man beaming about at them all. "Thanks, you guys – I really appreciate you comin' out…" Ernie Collins rambled on about how sad he was about retiring and how much he'd miss the force, but Chad was already not paying attention. The whole thing was just too depressing, and he'd heard it all many times before…he hoped he'd have something new to say when it was time for him to retire. Anyway, these retirement parties were always to dull, he'd rather play in traffic just to see what would happen.

Pushing off the wall he was leaning against, he made his way back to the bar for another beer. He sipped slowly, leaning back against the bar and scanning the crowd idly, eyes occasionally wandering over to the clock ion the opposite side of the room. "You look thrilled to be alive," a female voice observed, and he glanced over to see Andrea Battle watching him with amusement in her eyes.

"Hey, don't let the expression on my face fool you – these are the moments I live for," he cracked, taking another pull on his beer before looking at her once more. "Where's your partner?" Not that he wasn't thrilled at the man's absence.

Battle tilted her head at him. "Do you really want to know?"

That meant that Hopper was with Rita…he instantly regretted having asked and lifted the bottle to his lips. "Not really, no."

"That's a relief, because I have no idea where he is…what're you drinking, Heineken?" She motioned to his bottle and leaned over to get the bartender's attention.

Why was she even talking to him? She didn't like him. Well, nobody did, really. Anyways. "Yeah, they water the other stuff down here and I watched him open the bottle…."

"Then that's for me." She paid and perched on the bar stool next to him, looking over at Ernie who was shaking Spivak's hand and telling the same story that he'd laid on him earlier in the evening. "Saw you looking at the clock – somewhere to be?"

Chad glanced at her again. "Anywhere but here? Look, why are you even talking to me? You don't like me," he pointed out.

"Does anyone?"

"Well, my mother does…although I think that's because she has to. Didn't want to be imprisoned for putting me in a gunny sack and throwing me in the river when I was born, apparently." Chad turned towards her as she laughed, figuring that since they had gotten this far she wouldn't run away now. He missed having someone to talk to, even casually – the other officers at IA were too concerned with their careers to hang out with him, not that he blamed them any. He'd been the same way when he was just starting out, but lately he'd been thinking of how nice it would be to have some real friends. Besides, it would just burn Hopper up if he found out Battle was actually having a friendly conversation with him.

Battle tilted her head again as she looked at him, still smiling. "You're the only one I really know here – well, besides Spivak and he's an uptight pain in the ass" Chad snorted agreement and won a wider smile from her "and I thought you could maybe think up a good excuse for the both of us to be elsewhere."

He swirled the liquid inside the bottle pensively. "Well, the rules of etiquette say that we have to stay at least an hour…and it's only been fifteen minutes, despite it feeling as if several eternities have already passed." She was still smiling at him, and it was making him nervous. "Wanna go over there to a table so we can take verbal potshots at everybody else?"

The smile was still there. "Okay."

Andrea slid into a chair, not exactly knowing what had possessed her to go up to Shelten and talk to him. She'd been telling the truth; he really was the only one she knew aside from that bastard Spivak…but he really didn't seem so bad, outside of work. Well, so far. There was a reason he was divorced, after all. Right now he was regaling her with entertaining stories about the majority of the attendees of this endless retirement party and she was laughing because it was pretty damned funny. "So, what made you want to become a cop?" she asked, after breathing in deep to avoid choking on her beer.

Chad sighed heavily and looked off past her right ear, as if thinking of something he didn't really want to recall. "Well, when I was about nine years old, I…one of my best friends was run over by a Mack truck just beside the playground. The guy took off, and they never found him – I swore that when I grew up, I'd become a policeman and find him."

She reached a hand over the table to touch his sleeve. "I'm so sorry…"

He shifted his eyes back to hers, a grin spreading across his face. "That was actually a lie. I just got into it for the car chases I saw on tv."

"That's…really, really stupid," Andrea finally said, trying not to laugh and failing.

"Yeah, sorry." Chad grinned back at her and downed the rest of his beer. "So what about you?"

Andrea drew circles on the table with her finger thoughtfully. "Kind of a family thing, I guess you'd say. Dad was a beat cop for most of his life, my three uncles, and my big brother was a Sheriff's Deputy…so I kinda just followed in their footsteps."

He frowned. "No women in your family wanted to join the force?"

"Not really, they thought it was too much of a good ole boy's club…" They continued talking about different things, and Andrea found herself being constantly surprised at the fact that Chad Shelten could apparently be more than just an arrogant bastard and was actually pretty decent company. Of course, there was no way she'd tell Hopper that… she was telling him about a particularly humorous situation she had walked in on when entering her lieutenant's office when she realized that most of the crowd had already gone home. "Oh, lord – what time is it?" She asked, going for her watch. I had no idea that we'd been talking for this long...

Chad looked around at the mostly empty bar and down at his watch. "Oh…I think the requisite 'hour' has definitely passed and I've got to be in early tomorrow." He stood and tossed down a few folded bills, waiting patiently as she checked her phone for any messages. "Walk you out?"

"Okay," she agreed and they made the walk in silence until they reached her car. "Hey, so does this mean you'll go easy on me next time I get hauled into IA?" Andrea asked hopefully, holding the door open.

He looked down and smirked. "What do you think?"

"It was worth a try," she sighed.

"Next time, try harder. 'Night," he called back over his shoulder as he unlocked the door to his huge Yukon.

Next time? She sat in her car and stared after him thoughtfully as he drove away. What was that supposed to mean? "Weird. Now he's got me seeing him as an actual person." Andrea shook her head and put the car in drive.

tbc…