A/N: This seems like a good place to say a massive THANK YOU to everyone who's reading and reviewing. I wish this site had the functionality to reply to reviews (it… seems kind of creepy to send a personal email to a reviewer to say thanks, which, as far as I can tell, is my only option) but I just wanted to say that I read and am very, very grateful for each one. You guys are the BEST!

-o-o-o-

Chapter 17

Despite the admiralty's jocular warnings about the unpredictability of life in Operations and Tactical Command, core hours are weekdays, 0800 to 1800, and Kirk hasn't had a Monday-to-Friday job in… actually, he's never had a Monday-to-Friday job. Shift patterns have occasionally fallen that way, but never on purpose. It feels… wrong, as though he's trying to fit into someone else's clothes.

His new department is housed in the Bozeman Center, which curls in a lazy arc around the shores of Horseshoe Bay, under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. Mist curls from the iron-gray waters, frosting the restless waves and climbing up the gentle slopes, shimmering in the weak morning sun and tangling around the dress-uniformed legs of a Commodore-in-waiting who's been absent just long enough to get utterly lost in the grounds of HQ. His new assignment badge is unfamiliar on his chest and keeps catching his eye unexpectedly, distracting him as he searches for his bearings, and in the end he startles a couple of passing cadets by barking an unnecessarily terse request for directions to an office that turns out to be located fifteen feet from where he's standing.

Not the most auspicious of starts, but it could be worse. Half a dozen memories bubble unbidden to the surface, chased by a merciless, Do you remember the time…? and for a moment, it's as though Spock is standing beside him; he can almost feel him there, and the sentence finishes itself: do you remember the time we made First Contact on Gliese 581g and we got lost in the ceremonial Hall of Tunnels because their welcoming party assumed we'd be able to see in the dark too? And he can see the quirked eyebrow and the gradual softening of features that signifies great amusement, tightly reigned, and he can hear the loaded, expressive, Indeed, punctuating a pause just long enough to imply a thousand censored thoughts. And he can see himself turn into that emotionally ambiguous scrutiny, grin spread wide; he can feel his chest expand with the intake of breath that carries the opening salvo in a companionable war of words, that leads to the complicated semantic dance which summons that very specific rush of joy to his chest, and the warmth, and the contentment…

Kirk shakes his head once, briskly, and the image fragments, scattering on the persistent breeze. He clears his throat and bends into the retinal scanner.

Xenorelations is a sprawling suite of offices on the first floor of the complex, centered around a large central cubicle farm in which a series of floor-to-ceiling computer screens scroll constant streams of operational updates. It's barely 0745, but already the main room is alive with frenetic, noisy industry. Yeomen crisscross the floor carrying bundles of PADDs or speaking animatedly into communicators; comscreens buzz a squalling background chatter from all corners of the galaxy in a bewildering variety of dialects; newsholos blare from the distant corners of the room; enlisted officers and NCOs bark barely-intelligible commands into terminals; and in the center of it, in front of the leviathan screens and framed by an ethereal halo of electric light, stands Admiral Ciana, scanning a PADD with an expression of focused concentration, while three separate Lieutenant Commanders have conversations at her.

Even in the midst of complicated, destructive chaos, with Ensigns yelling status updates over a general calamitous rattle of panic and confusion, some corner of Kirk's mind that was apparently designed for this specific purpose keeps - kept - a tally of who's on his bridge. It's an instinct, a sense that tells him who is where, what skills they have, and how quickly they can be pressed into urgent duty wherever they're needed. It also tells him when someone else arrives, so that he can perform the complex command arithmetic that moves a newcomer to where they need to be, or, alternatively, so that he can draw his phaser and shoot before any of his crew get attacked. Ciana has at least four different centers of attention right now - and those are the ones that he can see - but when Kirk moves into the lobby and folds his hands behind his back, she glances up and nods, and holds up a hand to let him know that she'll be with him shortly. This is when he knows that he can work with her.

Xenoanthropology is unquestionably a vital component of Starfleet diplomacy, says Spock's voice out of nowhere, spiking through his memories from a half-forgotten conversation that happened six weeks into Kirk's command, when each day was still a battle of psychological attrition. Without study, there can be no understanding, and without understanding, there can be no accord. A significant pause, during which the Captain considered the merits versus repercussions of attempting to strangle a Vulcan. It is, however, a particularly Human trait to consider everything that is not Human "alien".

It stung at the time, because he was right, he knew he was right, and he knew that Kirk knew it too. And quite apart from the fact that there is a very specific and pernicious kind of sickly fury associated with the knowledge that one's nemesis has achieved and currently holds the moral high-ground, it stung because it was indicative of the circumstances on board his ship, and it was not the way Kirk wanted things to be. Enterprise was a Federation starship staffed almost exclusively by one race, and their token nod towards galactic diversity was struggling to hold his own in the face of a tidal wave of antipathy at best, resentment at worst. So the First Officer didn't exactly make it easy to like him. So the Captain himself wasn't precisely the face of Human-Vulcan shipboard harmony in those early days. The fact was that nobody was bending over backwards to panic about the intercultural disconnect, nobody found it unworthy of a ship whose mission was the establishment of friendly relations between the Federation and civilizations unknown; it hadn't even occurred to the powers that be to consider it an anomalous state of affairs. And it wasn't the way the Captain wanted things to be.

Kirk glances around the room as he waits. He counts four Andorians of various ranks; several Tellarites; a handful of Rigelians; and, twisting the angry ache against his ribs again, a Vulcan Commander, who steps out of one of the ring of offices surrounding the central atrium and disappears into the morass. He wonders absently how they've processed the Xeno part of the department in which they work.

"Kirk!" says Ciana cheerfully, snapping him out of his reverie as she strides towards him with a wide, open smile. She's small - a head shorter than Chekov, he guesses - but she moves with an assurance that camouflages her slight stature. At the press conference, she seemed to fill the space around her with a kind of luminescent energy, and the same radiance follows her now: an aura of easy confidence that knocks her relative fragility so far down the list of things that anyone is likely to notice about her that it disappears over the horizon and into the vanishing point. He's known women like her before, and they were precisely the sort of person you don't want to cross, because they have assimilated their disadvantages under a general rubric of ruthless self-awareness, and have generally learned at least eight different ways to separate an attacker from his favorite body parts before he notices he's been hit.

He wishes he could remember where he's supposed to have met her.

Kirk meets her handshake and finds it unexpectedly firm, and she reaches up with her left hand to give his shoulder a companionable slap that's oddly disconcerting. "Welcome," she says. "Let me show you your office. You'll like it - it's got a view to die for, right out over the bay." She's talking as she walks, words thrown back over her shoulder as she dodges the throngs of bodies with practiced ease, and he finds himself falling into step behind her before he's aware that he's moving. He feels rather than sees the covert glances of the displaced multitudes as he follows in her wake, like a shuttlecraft caught in a tractor beam, and he studiously ignores them. "Can't see much on a day like this, of course, but when the fog clears, it's something else," she's saying. "Guy who had the office before you used to say it'd focus his mind when he needed to get a bunch of ideas straight - just staring out at the waves, letting everything settle. Tried it myself a couple times; all I saw was a bunch of water and some boats. To each their own, I guess. But it sure does take your breath away when the light's right. How was Idaho?"

He blinks, caught off-guard by the abrupt subject-change as she steps up to a door that, he cannot help but notice, has carefully omitted any mention of its occupant's rank from the title plaque. At a press of her hand, it slides open onto the room that will be his. "Fine, thank you," he says.

She gestures him inside. "You have family out that way?"

"No, ma'am," he says, and smiles tightly.

Kirk steps through the door, into air that's stale with several weeks' vacancy: that particular mix of someone else's smell, a lingering odor of cleaning products and air conditioning, and the musty scent of disuse. The lights snap on as the controls register their presence, and their glow falls on a utilitarian blend of desk, static terminal, a couple of chairs, and a small sofa. Three of the walls are painted in hardy, military grays, without ornament or personality, and the fourth is entirely windowed, facing out across the choppy waters of the bay. As Kirk's eyes catalog the space, Ciana crosses briskly to the glass, snapping a command that causes the darkened pane to de-shade and reveal its January panorama of windswept slate and steel. The sun is low on the horizon, struggling through the clouds and casting them in watery pinks, and the wintry sky huddles close to the hazy outline of the city, threatening rain. Perhaps it will be a view worth seeing when the summer raises a yellow Californian sun above the peninsula and paints the sea in all the rich shades of azure he remembers from his Academy days, but for now all he can think about is the fact that his former office had a view, too, and it knocked seven bells out of this one.

He crosses to the desk and lays a hand on its surface, as still and untrembling as an object not subject to the vibrations of a ship at warp speed. It's cold beneath his skin and utterly alien, and Kirk tries to remember if he felt similarly transplanted the first time he set foot in his Captain's quarters. But his insubordinate brain, so quick to cast up unexpected images from his past at the faintest hint of a familiar smell or the syntax of a half-remembered conversation, refuses to supply an answer to that question. And it's only when the door slides softly shut behind him, cocooning them in sudden silence, that he realizes that Ciana is waiting for him to speak, and that the break in conversation has lingered too long to pass off as natural.

She's not stupid, nor is she obtuse. He's practiced at hiding his thoughts behind a diplomat's mask, but she's played the game for many years, and reading people is part of her job. As he blanks his face and turns into her scrutiny, he realizes abruptly that she's good enough at this that she's not going to break the ponderous hush until he does.

So he strings a smile across his lower face and says, "Thank you, ma'am. It's certainly an improvement on my last office at HQ."

Ciana's arms are folded in front of her chest and her face is drawn in quiet contemplation as she watches him. "That'd be back when you were a cadet, right?" she says.

He raises his eyebrows, drops them again in partial surrender. "That's right," he says. He tries the smile again. "I believe it was a five by eight drywall cubicle. In the library basement."

"Ha," she says. "Yeah. I remember those."

A beat: perfect, expectant silence. Bones would love this woman. Kirk says, "Well. I look forward to enjoying the view over the water as the seasons change."

The corners of her mouth twitch upwards into a faint smile, and he has the disarming sensation that she's come to some sort of conclusion, and that it might be a little more accurate than he would necessarily prefer.

"Yeah," she says. "Okay." Another small pause, too brief to analyze and too long to be accidental. Then she says, "Okay, I'll leave you to get your bearings, Captain. Introductions can wait." She waves a hand at his desk. "There's briefing notes on your terminal - take your time, read them through. I got meetings all morning but come see me at 1100 hours, we can talk some more."

Kirk nods. "Thank you, ma'am," he says.

She purses her lips, drops her eyes to the floor before lifting them abruptly to fix him with an unreadable stare. "You're gonna be damn good at this job, Captain Kirk," she says quietly. "I fought hard to get you. It's not…" She trails off, takes a breath. "It's not starship command. But it means something. It's important, what we do here. And it's challenging, and it's good work."

He can hear the defensiveness in her tone and realizes, belatedly, that he's pitched his approach all wrong. Eighty percent of the admiralty would have seen the mask and left it there. He's not used to dealing with the other twenty.

Kirk says, "Ma'am - if I've given you the impression that…"

"No," she says quickly. "You haven't. You're old school, Kirk - you have that smile, that work ethic. That commitment. 'Fleet comes first." A grin suddenly blazes across her face, like the ignition of a small star in the washed out, watery morning gloom. "But mostly that smile."

The grin is infectious; he can't help but return it. But beneath it, her eyes are serious and he wonders if, maybe, she really does understand. He says, again, "Thank you, ma'am."

Ciana shrugs. "I call it as I see it. You're gonna be damn good at this, Kirk. Your insights, your experience? I have half a dozen projects sitting on my desk right now that I want to get your take on. This First Contact on 42 Draconis b, I think there are lessons to be learned from your experience with the Cheronites. And your crew has had closer contact with the Tholians than anyone else in the fleet. I can use that knowledge, Kirk. We need someone like you."

She's right. He's been saying something similar for well over a decade now. He just didn't think it would be him.

But he says, "I'll be glad to do what I can."

Her smile remains, but her eyes are sharp and they are relentless. She nods. "Good," she says. A beat. Then she says again, "Good. Okay. I'll leave you to read, Captain." She nods a dismissal and turns to leave, but at the door, she hesitates.

"Kirk…" she says slowly, and the tone is that familiar blend of nonchalance and innocence that always precedes unwelcome news. "This is… I get that you hate these things. I do. But you had to have known there'd be publicity, right?"

Publicity. She means more publicity. He schools his expression and his voice, and he says, "I'd hoped to avoid it, but yes."

"Brass are planning a ceremony. Kind of a welcome back for you and your crew."

"A ticker tape parade," he says flatly, and she huffs a quiet laugh.

"Nothing like that," she says. "Promotions, honors, that kind of thing. Speeches. Cameras. You know, handshakes and backslaps. For everyone this time, not just you and Commander Spock." A beat. "The whole crew."

It's never the whole crew, he knows from experience: four hundred people just don't fit neatly onto a dais, and the public hunger isn't for the chefs and the janitors and the warp mechanics, the people who actually make the whole damn thing logistically possible. But she's never served on a starship. She doesn't know how these things work.

So he says, "I'd recommended some of my senior staff for promotion…"

"Yeah, I don't know." She shakes her head. "That's not my purview. But I'd be surprised if they weren't ratified. Commander Spock…?"

"He doesn't want a captaincy."

"He doesn't?" She raises her eyebrows. "Huh."

The air of barely-concealed consternation irritates him suddenly, and, to cover it, he says, "I'll be glad to take part in whatever the admiralty have planned."

"I think it'll be a good thing," she says, and Kirk's brain fills in the rest of the sentence: it'll be a good way to say goodbye.

Unconsciously, his hand reaches up to touch his new assignment badge, and the unfamiliar contours drag him back into the moment. He says, "Any word on when it will be?"

"Soon," she says. "You know, these things turn into a logistical nightmare; half the senior crew's reassigned already, they have to get everyone back together again, not everyone can get back to HQ… Your Yeoman will schedule it for you. I just… wanted you to have a heads up."

He purses his lips, flexes his hands. "I appreciate that, ma'am."

"Okay." She takes a breath. "I'll leave you to settle in. Any problems, Lieutenant Brz'nk is the woman to ask - she knows these systems inside out." The door swishes open and the wall of sound rushes through the gap. She grins. "Good to have you on board, Kirk."

And then she's gone. The silence closes in.

-o-o-o-

Silence, it turns out, is something you have to practice. It's like downtime, in that respect.

It's not until he finds himself with armfuls of free time that he realizes that he hasn't had any for the past five years. Off-duty time is not the same. In point of fact, there is no "off duty" on a starship, especially not for the Captain: a stolen hour at the chessboard or sharing a drink or curled around a book is just that - stolen. It's precious because it can be snatched back at a second's notice, no matter where you are or what you're in the middle of. A gamma radiation burst doesn't wait for you to wake up before it takes the aft shields offline and irradiates the left nacelle. Romulan Birds of Prey don't check your schedule to find out if it's convenient to mount an attack. Hostile alien parasites can and do send 70 percent of the crew to sickbay just as you're about to sit down to your first meal in 36 hours. There are an almost infinite number of ways to die in deep space, and, on any given day, two dozen of them will try to happen. If you're lucky, they'll happen when you're looking. Mostly, they wait until you relax.

Nor has he been alone, not really, since he took command. He could go to his quarters and shut the door, but, as often as not, there'd be a knock on it in an hour or so: Bones making sure he wasn't still working, Scotty with a new bottle of Scotch, Spock with some spurious query masquerading as work but transparently an effort to indulge in the science of camaraderie. Even at night, settling into sleep, there was the constant hum of the ship to remind him that she was there, the sound of voices, footsteps in corridors, continuous motion. It wasn't so much the sensation of constant companionship - that, he suspects, might have been cloying and invasive. It was more the sense that he existed in a nexus of collegiality, that there was always someone there if someone were ever needed. He hasn't been a stranger in a strange place for a long, long time.

He falls asleep the first night to the distant sounds of city life, but it's not the same. He feels no sense of connection to the far-off voices or to the traffic hum; he has no investment in any of it. On the second night, he cracks open a bottle of some expensive, exotic liqueur with a name he can barely read, let alone pronounce, for the simple fact that these things are available on Earth, as they are not in deep space. He carries it to the spreading window of his flag officer-grade apartment - an apartment, no less, when all he needed or wanted was a room in which to exist until they give him back his ship - and cradles it against his chest as the low winter sun sinks behind the Marin Headlands. He stands like this for hours, in silence, lost in thought.

In the mornings, he rises in the pre-dawn gray while the city sleeps around him, and makes his way across the Bridge in the wintry gloom. Sunrise lingers on the edge of the horizon, trailing long, chilly shadows from the hills above as he arrives at the Horseshoe Bay complex, where Ciana greets him with a smile that's a little too knowing for comfort. But the work is good; she wasn't lying when she said that it was both important and challenging. It takes a retuning of the circuitry of his brain that, he suspects, will be many months in truly establishing itself, but it's as close to exploring the boundaries of Federation space as he's likely to get while he's earthbound, and it is, after all, about time that someone was in charge of doing this right. There are, at any given moment, anywhere between fifty and two hundred likely-looking, inhabited systems in the Federal database that no-one's visited, and there are a staggering number of things that have to be considered before targeting any one of them for First Contact. It's very much like a game of chess - a question of moving resources into the right places to ensure that your queen advances, but that there's always a rook to back her up. It's about thinking twelve moves ahead; about the endgame and the most direct path through the labyrinth of maneuver and counter-maneuver. A binary system in Hydra has a pre-warp civilization that appears to be doing interesting things with temporal manipulation, if the tachyon emissions are to be believed, but it's close enough to the Romulan Neutral Zone that now might not be the time to drop in and say hi. There's at least one planet in 16 Cygni B that everyone's very excited about, and another two in 55 Cancri, but the former appears to be politically unstable, and there's reason to think that the latter system is not especially keen to welcome newcomers. It's all about pieces on an infinite chessboard: starships patrolling the edges of charted space, worlds that may or may not be ready for new friends, resources just begging to be tapped, history waiting to be made. On his recommendation, distant ships will set their course-headings, distant Captains will plan their opening words of welcome, distant protocols will be invoked. This was always one of his favorite parts of commanding the Enterprise, it's just that, now, he's the one pulling the strings that make the puppet dance.

On the third night, he flicks idly through the stations on his holovid while the setting sun gradually draws the shadows from the walls and darkens the room around him. Skipping through the news channels, he catches his own name in a fragment of conversation and quickly switches it off, plunging the room into claustrophobic, sucking silence. Funny how, in his memory, San Francisco is always associated with the sound of birdsong. He lived here for three full years as a cadet, then on and off for over a decade; logically, there were long periods in which it wasn't summer, so why does his brain insist of categorizing these current circumstances as wrong?

Funny how, when he was surrounded by a vacuum, the air seemed less empty.

Kirk works late on the fourth night. And on the fifth, sixth and seventh. He stops counting after that.

The confirmation of his Commodore's stripes arrives on his terminal midway through his third week in Xenorelations, appended by a brief word of congratulations and a note to the effect that they'll be presented to him at a short ceremony to commemorate the safe return of the USS Enterprise following her historic five-year mission. He stares at the screen for a moment or two and, on impulse, comms his Yeoman and asks her to pull contact details for Lieutenant Commander Decker, currently serving as First Officer on board the USS Hektor. Kirk rattles off a long-overdue communique, congratulating him on a promotion that's already eight months old, and stutters over banalities while he tries to work out how to ask the question that's digging claws of cold panic into his brain: How did your father convince the admiralty to let him have command of a starship after they'd promoted him to flag rank?

Ciana pokes her head around Kirk's door as he's discontentedly scanning through his seventeenth draft. This, too, is something to be assimilated into his worldview: he's become entirely too accustomed to being the highest ranking officer in his working environment, and it's not easy to get used to the fact that his time now belongs to someone else.

"Kirk," she says, "Congratulations. I just heard."

He makes himself smile. "Thank you, Admiral."

"Well-deserved," she says. "Listen, I gotta be on Luna for a few days, until this thing with the New Humans blows over, but when I get back, drinks are on me, okay?" His face must register a complete absence of enthusiasm, because she laughs and says, "This is a good thing, Kirk. It's a promotion. It means you're doing something they like. You know that, right?"

There is no way to make her understand. On the ground, there are no strings attached to advancement through the ranks. He says, "Yes, ma'am." A beat. Something further is clearly expected. "I look forward to it."

There's a pause, just a shade too long, and when he looks up she's watching him carefully with eyes that, as ever, miss very little. "Okay, good," she says at last. "Maybe you can finally tell me some of those stories you don't know how to tell."

He laughs his diplomatic laugh. "I believe you'll have to make that an order, ma'am."

She laughs too, but carefully. "Maybe I will," she says, and ducks back out into the fray.

-o-o-o-

That night, he comms his parents with the news, and is delighted to find them unavailable. Kirk leaves a message with a young Ensign in his father's office, who is uncomfortably effusive in her approbation, then signs off and quietly sips on unpronounceable liquor until he falls asleep in his chair.

The following night he gives in.

Senior officers' quarters are across a wide, tree-lined plaza to the back of his residential block, denuded of the ocean view afforded to the flag officers' apartments, and accessed by a meandering lane that leads to the Presidio complex and onwards to Academy HQ. If he walks out his front door and stands in the corridor outside, he can look directly into the upper windows of the fourth and fifth blocks; he can practically see, in his mind's eye, the view from the central courtyard that he knows from those interminable, planet-bound days before he took command. It's scarcely any distance at all, compared to what it could have been - less than a mile at the widest point, and yet it might as well be half the galaxy for all he knows how to bridge the gap.

They didn't say goodbye. Kirk has no idea what that means.

He rummages in his discarded uniform pants for his communicator and tosses it idly between his hands as he crosses back into the living area from the bedroom. The sun is setting again, streaking fiery crimson-orange across the bowl of the Pacific, and Luna skulks on the edges of the night sky, whispering of the worlds beyond. Kirk flips open the device and stares at it for a moment, as though it might lose patience with his procrastination and make the decision for him. He flips it shut.

It's not as though you can just call someone up to ask, did I leave you, or did you leave me?, even if those words have no deeper meaning or significance. It's not as though he has any clear idea of what to say or how to say it. It's not as though they haven't tried to make things right, and it just… hasn't happened. The pain beneath his ribs twists savagely, flaring a white hot streak behind his eyes before it drops abruptly into its habitual dull, background ache.

Enough. He reaches for his communicator. But he dials Bones.

"Just so's we're clear," says the gruff voice, without preamble, "I ain't callin' you Captain, or sir, or anythin' similar while we're grounded, Jim."

"I think you'll find," says Kirk, "That it's Commodore now, anyway, Bones."

There's a long silence. Kirk closes his eyes; this is what he needed. This reaction, right here. He needs someone else to understand.

"Huh," says Bones. "That so, Jim?"

"You heard about this shindig they're throwing for us all?"

"Heard a rumor," he says, in a tone that says he'd been banking on it vanishing into the ether.

"No such luck," says Kirk. "They'll announce it publicly during the ceremony. But it's effective immediately."

"God damn," snaps McCoy, with unexpected vitriol. A beat. Then: "What's the hobgoblin got to say about all of this?"

"Spock?" says Kirk, unnecessarily. As if there might be another hobgoblin, let alone one who might be expected to have an opinion on Kirk's promotion. "I don't… Why?"

"Why?" snaps Bones, and then there's a sigh. "Dammit, Jim…"

Kirk's not sure if he's been caught out, and he's not sure what, exactly, he might have been caught out at. So he says, carefully, "I could use a drink, Bones."

"You and me both," says McCoy wearily. "How 'bout some of that liquor you never saw in my quarters?"

"That contraband that you'd never dream of smuggling on board my ship?"

"That one," says Bones.

"If you're in possession of an illegal substance, Dr. McCoy, I'm afraid I'm going to have to confiscate it."

"Guess you might be needing my help with that, though."

"I guess so."

There's a pause. But Bones has never been much good at his voodoo mind tricks when he can't back them up with the stink eye, and he gives up after an abortive minute of waiting for Kirk to elaborate.

Instead, he says, "That mansion they got you in, Mr. Flag Officer - it got much of a view?"

Kirk glances out towards the shadowy spine of the Bridge, bisecting the rising moonlight on the choppy water as the Bay descends into twilight, and the louring headland beyond. "Some," he says.

"Huh," says Bones. "Can't hardly see the opposite wall from my window. You hostin'?"

Kirk grins. "You bring the liquor, I'll provide the scenery."

"Guess I'll see you in ten, then, Jim," says Bones. "McCoy out."

He's gone. The silence rushes in again as the line closes, ringing in Kirk's ears in the sudden absence of sound. He flips the communicator closed and tosses it onto his desk, knuckles his hands on the chill, imitation-wood surface, takes a breath, closes his eyes.

On the wall above his head, hiding in the shadows, a ship called Enterprize drifts in an eternal breeze.