Superman Returns
Title: What is Essential
Fandom: Superman Returns
Characters/Pairing: Clark Kent/Lois Lane/Richard White and Jason
Disclaimer: Alas, I don’t own these people. The Siegels, Shusters, DC and Warner do.
Prompt 6: Any fandom: Polyamory/Triads as a working, stable relationship choice, which involves being out and open about the decision.
Author notes: Many thanks to newredshoes for her kind feedback and _bounce_ and ion_bond for their mad beta skillz on v. short notice, and everybody for their hand petting and encouragement. You are all awesome you guys. <3
“What does it mean…to tame?”
“It means to establish ties.”
---The Little Prince, Antoine St. Exupery
The thing you must understand about Clark Kent is that he is not brave.
Not when it comes down to essentials. Not when it comes down to the tangled microcosms that are people and the ties that bind. First, he is too ingrained in the importance of seeming normal (if bumbling and consequently unattractive), and second, he is too haunted by the ugly specter of what people do when they discover you are different.
The first has more to do with Martha and Jonathan Kent’s fear of what government agencies would do to an alien child than any Dursleyian fear of the extraordinary. The second has more to do with Lana and Pete, and a boy named Eric Villarde. Eric was small and frail-looking, but he was funny and smart, and consequently, more popular than a non-jock had a right to be. He played baseball with Clark’s trio, swapped comic books, and debated whether or not Captain America was right to disobey the government. And if there were rumors about Eric, rumors that said he wasn’t quite right, Clark didn’t listen. Everybody had things said about them, every now and then. In any case, he didn’t particularly like the people who spread them.
Eric left in their sophomore year, Smallville High and the town buzzing in his wake. His family said he’d been sent to boarding school, but there were rumors that his Dad had caught him making out with Rob Jarlowe and sent him off somewhere to a Doctor “who could fix him.” It sounded both surreal and terrifying to Clark-who’d grown up listening to his parents’ frightened whispers as they argued about what was safe for Clark to do and what might happen if their judgments were wrong.
“At least the boy’s getting the help he needs,” Jonathan said, doling out the buttered potatoes to his tiny family. He did not sound completely convinced, but as if he were trying to look at the glass half-full. Martha sighed in turn, and squeezed their son’s hand.
Clark didn’t say anything. That year, he’d become aware of the changing synapses in his brain, the wild riot of color that ran whenever he was around his two best friends. He’d known Pete and Lana since forever, and though what happened to Eric confirmed it, he was old enough to know what he felt wasn’t right, wasn’t proper, that even the people who loved you might stop if they found out.
So Clark, all of fifteen, and firmly indoctrinated in the importance of hiding, firmly resolved to be normal and spare people aspects that shouldn’t see the light of day. He became what the velveteen rabbit would have been without the old horse’s advice, St. Exupery’s fox, pre-Prince: not entirely real to the people around him, unessential, and occasionally, something to be shot at.
So it should be happily ever when he falls in love with Lois, Richard, when he finds the courage to tell them who he is and discovers, over the years, that he has become essential and not something that will break the family apart. He becomes real to people other than Martha and Jonathan Kent: the man who counts off his lovers’ heartbeats and takes them dancing one by one, soft-shoe in the sky, their bare feet resting on his boots. He’s Clark, who is prone to babbling and awkwardness and occasional stuttering; flies out to save the world and can be found asleep on their couch on Saturday mornings. The velvet of his nose has rubbed off, his coat has become worn and frayed and he should be very shabby indeed, but he is loved.
It should be that easy and simple, but that is not how real life works.
#
The autumn Jason turns twelve, Richard and Lois take Clark
out for lunch, bring him to the pancake parlor on Jameson St. In the midst of pancakes with sausages and egg, pancakes with strawberry jelly, and pancakes with melted butter, they casually suggest he should give up his closet of an apartment and move in with them.
Clark should have guessed. Richard White and Lois Lane do not simply suggest they have lunch in a pancake parlor. Richard’s favorite foods are sushi rolls, burritos, Mexican pizza and Lois’ are glazed-over stir fries and fried rice in carton boxes. They are relentless in teasing Clark for his fondness of pancakes and floats.
“Clark? Earth to Clark. Have you telepathically traveled all the way back to Krypton again-?”
“Sorry,” Clark said. He pushes his glasses up his nose. “I’m just not sure what to say.”
“Oh come on, Smallville.” Lois said. “We’ve been doing this thing for months. Years, if you count the time it took us to figure it all out.”
“But this is different,” said Clark. “Moving in with you means people knowing about us.”
“Pretty much,” Richard agreed.
“Guys,” Clark said.
“Clark, look.” Richard said. “Will people talk? Sure. Will they be jerks about it? Maybe, but that’s their problem and not ours.”
“Some people,” Lois corrected. “Not everyone.” She turned around to pull a battered manila folder out of her handbag and gave it to Clark. “The fact is, polyamory is gaining wider practice, if not mainstream. I’m not talking about polygamous sects. We’re talking out true-blue, button-shirt, boring people, who just so happen to have more than two in their tango. We’re hardly weird.”
“Have you read the articles about the boring button-shirt poly families who lose their kids?”
He’s never done well with silences and fidgets nervously with the pancakes on his plate. He almost wishes he’d never said anything, but it had to be said. You do not do anything beyond the normative, and get away with it. Superman’s an exception, and he pays for that, every now and then, with an almost death to him and his own.
“Smallville.”
He looked up.
“Clark,” Lois said. “Listen to us. This isn’t Kansas. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“My point is while we might have the occasional wing-nut, the same rules don’t apply. We don’t any active laws against polyamory, and we’re talking about the most liberal city in the most liberal state of the U.S.
“Yeah, our legal status as a family is shaky, but Jason is loved, he’s spoiled rotten, he’s well-looked after. No one can take him from us, even if our families object.”
“And there are legal steps we can take to make sure everyone’s taken care of in case something happens,” Richard said. “You really think Lois and I would suggest this if we thought Jason would be at risk?
“No,” Clark said. He looked hard at Richard, at Lois. “You guys seem to have thought this through.”
“Clark, we weren’t leaving you out of the loop,” said Richard. “It’s just-we know your feelings.”
“Translation: we know all your arguments against and we wanted to address them,” Lois said. He meets her eyes and their gazes match: flint for stone. She’d always been the most fearless, so she has much less patience for Clark’s misgivings, his reticence.
Discovering that she’d been with Superman for years, never knowing he was also Clark might have something to do with it. So he’s the first whose gaze softens with apology.
Lois leans forward now, eyes bright and fixed.
“Look, Smallville. All this time we’ve been together, you can’t tell me we’re not family, as much as you and parents were. And we’re not pushing you to do anything you don’t want to. Your decision.”
Clark pushes his glasses up his nose: an odd nervous tick.
If this were a story, this would be the part where he said, yes, I want to move in with you, I want to live you, shabby patches and rubbed noses, love and all, because he cannot imagine anything else. Instead:
“I need to think about it,” he said. “Just for a little while.”
#
Over the years, people at the Daily Planet began to think of Clark as part of the Lane-White conglomerate, though God knew what Richard and Lois saw in him. But their friendship was accepted with a brief shrug and then, a mad rush to fill whatever headline Perry had his heart set on. Usually about Superman, or whatever caped crusader dropped by Metropolis this week.
He doesn’t think they’d be as sanguine if they knew what was actually happening in Richard and Lois’ house, in his apartment, behind closed doors. That he argued with Richard and Lois over bills, fighting to pay for his share of things, that they wrangled over schedules to make sure someone was always with Jason. That he actually slept with Richard White and Lois Lane, legs tangling, someone curled up against his chest and again at his back.
And then he thinks of his Mom. She’d read him the Velveteen Rabbit and E.B White, taught him about love, mercy and family, and what was right and wrong. And every now and then, asked him if he was seeing someone.
She knows about Lois and Richard of course, and Jason. After years of pining after Lois as Clark Kent, courting her as Superman, it was relief that her son had friends who knew the two sides of him, and cared about him after all. But she doesn’t know everything, hence the questions and gentle nudges.
“You have to move on, sweetheart.” She said, a gentle rebuke in her voice. “I know you would never do anything improper, but it must be hard for you. And meeting someone else doesn’t mean you can’t keep on being friends with their family, or be a part of Jason’s life.”
“I’m happy as I am, Ma,” he mumbled, the red creeping under his neck. “Really.”
“Are you?”
He was. He really, really was and he was going to tell her, and why, and not to worry because he had never been this happy, not since he was a teenager safe with Lana and Pete. But there was a poison knot where his heart should be.
She was essential. What they were as mother and son was essential. And he’d been real and beloved to her all his life: would he unmake the process, become a monster instead if he told her what was happening? The reality of what the three of them were?
“Yes,” was all he said. And said goodbye before hanging up the phone.
#
“What are you scared of Clark, really?”
Lois again, sympathy underlining the flint in her voice.
They were sitting in the living room, Jason long gone to bed, superheroing done for the night.
“I think it’s pretty clear.”
Clark knows from her heartbeat that her first instinct is to say something impatient. He doesn’t blame her really. It’s an argument they’ve had time and again, and he thinks even Richard’s patience is wearing thin.
“Hey.”
She sits down beside him and circles her hand in his. He feels warmed by it, and safe. ”Look, Clark from what you’ve told us about your Mom, she wouldn’t -she might have a hard time getting used to it, but you wouldn’t just stop being her son.”
“She has very clear ideas about what a family should be.” Clark said. “We’re not that.”
“Even if that’s true, Smallville, that doesn’t equal disowning you for not toeing the line. She took you in after plucking you from a burning rocket, for God’s sake. She raised you through flying repeatedly into the ceiling and super strength and asthma. I think you’re underestimating her.”
“My mom’s one of the most amazing people I know,” Clark said. “I’m not just saying that because I’m her son. But this is different. This is so tied up to what she thinks is good-what she raised me to believe is good. I’ve never gone outside that before.”
Never gone outside it, never compromised it, because until now, they’ve shared the same, unwavering beliefs about everything.
“So you’ll have to convince her.” Richard said. He has moved to the back of the couch, and he’s stroking Clark’s hair, who leans back for the touch. “Don’t you think that, at the end of the day, she’d just want you to be happy?”
Clark just wasn’t sure.
#
And it’s not right. If he can’t do this, if he can’t tell her himself, how is he going to handle letting other people know? He asks Richard and Lois for more time.
He visits his Mom, talks more about Lois and Richard, the spaces between them, without defining what they are. She smiles, nods, though he can hear the quickening of her heartbeat, hear the ebb and tide of emotion. Suspicion, wonder, anxiety, infinite patience.
It is not easy, but they are getting there.
“Are you happy?” Martha Kent finally said, when he visited her last weekend on her new farm. When he said yes (again) she said, “That’s all I want, Clark. The rest doesn’t matter.”
But he doesn’t know how much she knows or guesses. The waiting game frightens him
It’s the four of them walking on the Metropolis harbor, Jason running ahead of them and back while Clark keeps a close eye in the dark, under the lamps. Jason flickers in and out like a shadow, an image that makes his heart ache.
There are groups of people walking with them on the harbour, but that’s to be expected. It’s the weekend, and everyone wants a romantic night out, lights burning in the night, and other people.
A quadret strolled ahead of them, their children mixing with each other and Jason as they ran back and forth. Had it been anyone else, they would have assumed they were simply two couples, but Clark has long learned to see with different eyes, and he can't help but notice the affectionate, loving ease. Lovers, or very old friends. Either way, the sight of them made Clark feel very warm.
“Okay,” Clark said suddenly.
Lois looked at him puzzled. “Sorry Clark what?”
“Ok. I want to move in,” said Clark. “There’s something I need to do first, but yes.”
#
There is a long silence at the end of the phone. His heart skips several beats and he says:
“Mom, please say something.”
“Are you happy?”
There is a long drawn-out breath, a sigh.
“Yes Ma’am.”
“Good,” she said. And then: “I’d like them to come over.”
A pause. “What?” he said softly.
“Introduce them and Jason to Ben.” Martha Kent said, matter of factly. “It’s not right that he hasn’t met my grandson and his parents after all.”
“Mom, what are you going to tell Ben?”
“That they’re family,” she said firmly.
#
Clark moves in on a blustery afternoon. They get Richard’s car because hah---how could they explain not needing one for Clark and his things? Everything incriminating has been flown into the house in the dead of night.
Jason is ecstatic. His other Dad is finally home.
“You’re staying with Mum and Dad,” Jason said, grinning. “Did you know that?” Clark coughed, pushed his glasses up his nose, and babbled something about Chinese peas. His lovers laugh.
Fandom: Superman Returns
Characters/Pairing: Clark Kent/Lois Lane/Richard White and Jason
Disclaimer: Alas, I don’t own these people. The Siegels, Shusters, DC and Warner do.
Prompt 6: Any fandom: Polyamory/Triads as a working, stable relationship choice, which involves being out and open about the decision.
Author notes: Many thanks to newredshoes for her kind feedback and _bounce_ and ion_bond for their mad beta skillz on v. short notice, and everybody for their hand petting and encouragement. You are all awesome you guys. <3
“What does it mean…to tame?”
“It means to establish ties.”
---The Little Prince, Antoine St. Exupery
The thing you must understand about Clark Kent is that he is not brave.
Not when it comes down to essentials. Not when it comes down to the tangled microcosms that are people and the ties that bind. First, he is too ingrained in the importance of seeming normal (if bumbling and consequently unattractive), and second, he is too haunted by the ugly specter of what people do when they discover you are different.
The first has more to do with Martha and Jonathan Kent’s fear of what government agencies would do to an alien child than any Dursleyian fear of the extraordinary. The second has more to do with Lana and Pete, and a boy named Eric Villarde. Eric was small and frail-looking, but he was funny and smart, and consequently, more popular than a non-jock had a right to be. He played baseball with Clark’s trio, swapped comic books, and debated whether or not Captain America was right to disobey the government. And if there were rumors about Eric, rumors that said he wasn’t quite right, Clark didn’t listen. Everybody had things said about them, every now and then. In any case, he didn’t particularly like the people who spread them.
Eric left in their sophomore year, Smallville High and the town buzzing in his wake. His family said he’d been sent to boarding school, but there were rumors that his Dad had caught him making out with Rob Jarlowe and sent him off somewhere to a Doctor “who could fix him.” It sounded both surreal and terrifying to Clark-who’d grown up listening to his parents’ frightened whispers as they argued about what was safe for Clark to do and what might happen if their judgments were wrong.
“At least the boy’s getting the help he needs,” Jonathan said, doling out the buttered potatoes to his tiny family. He did not sound completely convinced, but as if he were trying to look at the glass half-full. Martha sighed in turn, and squeezed their son’s hand.
Clark didn’t say anything. That year, he’d become aware of the changing synapses in his brain, the wild riot of color that ran whenever he was around his two best friends. He’d known Pete and Lana since forever, and though what happened to Eric confirmed it, he was old enough to know what he felt wasn’t right, wasn’t proper, that even the people who loved you might stop if they found out.
So Clark, all of fifteen, and firmly indoctrinated in the importance of hiding, firmly resolved to be normal and spare people aspects that shouldn’t see the light of day. He became what the velveteen rabbit would have been without the old horse’s advice, St. Exupery’s fox, pre-Prince: not entirely real to the people around him, unessential, and occasionally, something to be shot at.
So it should be happily ever when he falls in love with Lois, Richard, when he finds the courage to tell them who he is and discovers, over the years, that he has become essential and not something that will break the family apart. He becomes real to people other than Martha and Jonathan Kent: the man who counts off his lovers’ heartbeats and takes them dancing one by one, soft-shoe in the sky, their bare feet resting on his boots. He’s Clark, who is prone to babbling and awkwardness and occasional stuttering; flies out to save the world and can be found asleep on their couch on Saturday mornings. The velvet of his nose has rubbed off, his coat has become worn and frayed and he should be very shabby indeed, but he is loved.
It should be that easy and simple, but that is not how real life works.
#
The autumn Jason turns twelve, Richard and Lois take Clark
out for lunch, bring him to the pancake parlor on Jameson St. In the midst of pancakes with sausages and egg, pancakes with strawberry jelly, and pancakes with melted butter, they casually suggest he should give up his closet of an apartment and move in with them.
Clark should have guessed. Richard White and Lois Lane do not simply suggest they have lunch in a pancake parlor. Richard’s favorite foods are sushi rolls, burritos, Mexican pizza and Lois’ are glazed-over stir fries and fried rice in carton boxes. They are relentless in teasing Clark for his fondness of pancakes and floats.
“Clark? Earth to Clark. Have you telepathically traveled all the way back to Krypton again-?”
“Sorry,” Clark said. He pushes his glasses up his nose. “I’m just not sure what to say.”
“Oh come on, Smallville.” Lois said. “We’ve been doing this thing for months. Years, if you count the time it took us to figure it all out.”
“But this is different,” said Clark. “Moving in with you means people knowing about us.”
“Pretty much,” Richard agreed.
“Guys,” Clark said.
“Clark, look.” Richard said. “Will people talk? Sure. Will they be jerks about it? Maybe, but that’s their problem and not ours.”
“Some people,” Lois corrected. “Not everyone.” She turned around to pull a battered manila folder out of her handbag and gave it to Clark. “The fact is, polyamory is gaining wider practice, if not mainstream. I’m not talking about polygamous sects. We’re talking out true-blue, button-shirt, boring people, who just so happen to have more than two in their tango. We’re hardly weird.”
“Have you read the articles about the boring button-shirt poly families who lose their kids?”
He’s never done well with silences and fidgets nervously with the pancakes on his plate. He almost wishes he’d never said anything, but it had to be said. You do not do anything beyond the normative, and get away with it. Superman’s an exception, and he pays for that, every now and then, with an almost death to him and his own.
“Smallville.”
He looked up.
“Clark,” Lois said. “Listen to us. This isn’t Kansas. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“My point is while we might have the occasional wing-nut, the same rules don’t apply. We don’t any active laws against polyamory, and we’re talking about the most liberal city in the most liberal state of the U.S.
“Yeah, our legal status as a family is shaky, but Jason is loved, he’s spoiled rotten, he’s well-looked after. No one can take him from us, even if our families object.”
“And there are legal steps we can take to make sure everyone’s taken care of in case something happens,” Richard said. “You really think Lois and I would suggest this if we thought Jason would be at risk?
“No,” Clark said. He looked hard at Richard, at Lois. “You guys seem to have thought this through.”
“Clark, we weren’t leaving you out of the loop,” said Richard. “It’s just-we know your feelings.”
“Translation: we know all your arguments against and we wanted to address them,” Lois said. He meets her eyes and their gazes match: flint for stone. She’d always been the most fearless, so she has much less patience for Clark’s misgivings, his reticence.
Discovering that she’d been with Superman for years, never knowing he was also Clark might have something to do with it. So he’s the first whose gaze softens with apology.
Lois leans forward now, eyes bright and fixed.
“Look, Smallville. All this time we’ve been together, you can’t tell me we’re not family, as much as you and parents were. And we’re not pushing you to do anything you don’t want to. Your decision.”
Clark pushes his glasses up his nose: an odd nervous tick.
If this were a story, this would be the part where he said, yes, I want to move in with you, I want to live you, shabby patches and rubbed noses, love and all, because he cannot imagine anything else. Instead:
“I need to think about it,” he said. “Just for a little while.”
#
Over the years, people at the Daily Planet began to think of Clark as part of the Lane-White conglomerate, though God knew what Richard and Lois saw in him. But their friendship was accepted with a brief shrug and then, a mad rush to fill whatever headline Perry had his heart set on. Usually about Superman, or whatever caped crusader dropped by Metropolis this week.
He doesn’t think they’d be as sanguine if they knew what was actually happening in Richard and Lois’ house, in his apartment, behind closed doors. That he argued with Richard and Lois over bills, fighting to pay for his share of things, that they wrangled over schedules to make sure someone was always with Jason. That he actually slept with Richard White and Lois Lane, legs tangling, someone curled up against his chest and again at his back.
And then he thinks of his Mom. She’d read him the Velveteen Rabbit and E.B White, taught him about love, mercy and family, and what was right and wrong. And every now and then, asked him if he was seeing someone.
She knows about Lois and Richard of course, and Jason. After years of pining after Lois as Clark Kent, courting her as Superman, it was relief that her son had friends who knew the two sides of him, and cared about him after all. But she doesn’t know everything, hence the questions and gentle nudges.
“You have to move on, sweetheart.” She said, a gentle rebuke in her voice. “I know you would never do anything improper, but it must be hard for you. And meeting someone else doesn’t mean you can’t keep on being friends with their family, or be a part of Jason’s life.”
“I’m happy as I am, Ma,” he mumbled, the red creeping under his neck. “Really.”
“Are you?”
He was. He really, really was and he was going to tell her, and why, and not to worry because he had never been this happy, not since he was a teenager safe with Lana and Pete. But there was a poison knot where his heart should be.
She was essential. What they were as mother and son was essential. And he’d been real and beloved to her all his life: would he unmake the process, become a monster instead if he told her what was happening? The reality of what the three of them were?
“Yes,” was all he said. And said goodbye before hanging up the phone.
#
“What are you scared of Clark, really?”
Lois again, sympathy underlining the flint in her voice.
They were sitting in the living room, Jason long gone to bed, superheroing done for the night.
“I think it’s pretty clear.”
Clark knows from her heartbeat that her first instinct is to say something impatient. He doesn’t blame her really. It’s an argument they’ve had time and again, and he thinks even Richard’s patience is wearing thin.
“Hey.”
She sits down beside him and circles her hand in his. He feels warmed by it, and safe. ”Look, Clark from what you’ve told us about your Mom, she wouldn’t -she might have a hard time getting used to it, but you wouldn’t just stop being her son.”
“She has very clear ideas about what a family should be.” Clark said. “We’re not that.”
“Even if that’s true, Smallville, that doesn’t equal disowning you for not toeing the line. She took you in after plucking you from a burning rocket, for God’s sake. She raised you through flying repeatedly into the ceiling and super strength and asthma. I think you’re underestimating her.”
“My mom’s one of the most amazing people I know,” Clark said. “I’m not just saying that because I’m her son. But this is different. This is so tied up to what she thinks is good-what she raised me to believe is good. I’ve never gone outside that before.”
Never gone outside it, never compromised it, because until now, they’ve shared the same, unwavering beliefs about everything.
“So you’ll have to convince her.” Richard said. He has moved to the back of the couch, and he’s stroking Clark’s hair, who leans back for the touch. “Don’t you think that, at the end of the day, she’d just want you to be happy?”
Clark just wasn’t sure.
#
And it’s not right. If he can’t do this, if he can’t tell her himself, how is he going to handle letting other people know? He asks Richard and Lois for more time.
He visits his Mom, talks more about Lois and Richard, the spaces between them, without defining what they are. She smiles, nods, though he can hear the quickening of her heartbeat, hear the ebb and tide of emotion. Suspicion, wonder, anxiety, infinite patience.
It is not easy, but they are getting there.
“Are you happy?” Martha Kent finally said, when he visited her last weekend on her new farm. When he said yes (again) she said, “That’s all I want, Clark. The rest doesn’t matter.”
But he doesn’t know how much she knows or guesses. The waiting game frightens him
It’s the four of them walking on the Metropolis harbor, Jason running ahead of them and back while Clark keeps a close eye in the dark, under the lamps. Jason flickers in and out like a shadow, an image that makes his heart ache.
There are groups of people walking with them on the harbour, but that’s to be expected. It’s the weekend, and everyone wants a romantic night out, lights burning in the night, and other people.
A quadret strolled ahead of them, their children mixing with each other and Jason as they ran back and forth. Had it been anyone else, they would have assumed they were simply two couples, but Clark has long learned to see with different eyes, and he can't help but notice the affectionate, loving ease. Lovers, or very old friends. Either way, the sight of them made Clark feel very warm.
“Okay,” Clark said suddenly.
Lois looked at him puzzled. “Sorry Clark what?”
“Ok. I want to move in,” said Clark. “There’s something I need to do first, but yes.”
#
There is a long silence at the end of the phone. His heart skips several beats and he says:
“Mom, please say something.”
“Are you happy?”
There is a long drawn-out breath, a sigh.
“Yes Ma’am.”
“Good,” she said. And then: “I’d like them to come over.”
A pause. “What?” he said softly.
“Introduce them and Jason to Ben.” Martha Kent said, matter of factly. “It’s not right that he hasn’t met my grandson and his parents after all.”
“Mom, what are you going to tell Ben?”
“That they’re family,” she said firmly.
#
Clark moves in on a blustery afternoon. They get Richard’s car because hah---how could they explain not needing one for Clark and his things? Everything incriminating has been flown into the house in the dead of night.
Jason is ecstatic. His other Dad is finally home.
“You’re staying with Mum and Dad,” Jason said, grinning. “Did you know that?” Clark coughed, pushed his glasses up his nose, and babbled something about Chinese peas. His lovers laugh.