Fic: 16 Proofs of Love, #07 Coughing or clearing one's throat: I love you
Title: So I Came in Here (And Your Long-Time Curse Hurts)
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: T
Genres: het
Summary: It's Vietnam 1966 and Colonel John Sheppard goes to visit an old friend.
A/N: So. Sparky. OMG. Like, the first time ever I'm writing this, as I just realized. Over five years of writing Stargate and I never even once wrote Sparky. So, first try and it's more implied than actual relationship but anyway... what do you think? I always found Elizabeth extremely complex to write and I hope I got her dialogue right. Um. Opinions, anyone?
PS.: You can see the other finished stories here.
( Kennedy Made Him Believe (We Could Do Much More) )
( We'll Dance Until Morning ('Til There's Just You And Me) )
( With No Direction Home (Like a Complete Unknown) )
So I Came in Here (And Your Long-Time Curse Hurts)
“It was raining from the first
And I was dying there of thirst
So I came in here
And your long-time curse hurts
But what’s worse
Is this pain in here
I can’t stay in here.”
Bob Dylan, “Just Like a Woman”
He knows he shouldn’t be here. He knows he should be back at the base, pouring over paperwork and working out a way to keep his XO from getting his ass fried for the little stunt he pulled an hour ago. And yet, the first thing he did after keeping Lorne from beating the crap out of that little shit Baker was commandeering the next best vehicle he could find and take it to a little backstreet apartment complex in the expatriate quarter of Saigon.
So here he is, yet again. Standing in front of Elizabeth’s door, waiting for her to open it and for the hundredth time wondering if this will be the day she’ll have decided that she won’t put up with him anymore.
“Good evening, John.”
Obviously, it isn’t.
He smiles. “Hi, Liz.” She gives him a deadpan look - Jesus Christ, is it a fucking requirement for women to be able to do that with their face to be allowed to go to ‘Nam? - and crosses her arms in front of her chest, leaning against the doorframe. He holds up the bottle in his hand. “I, uh, brought booze?”
At that, she rolls her eyes and makes a mock invitational gesture and he follows her inside her dingy apartment. There’s only one bed/living room, a bathroom and a kitchenette and a lazily rotating fan on the ceiling. And, possibly, his favorite place in all of ‘Nam: the tiny balcony that only fits a French looking rickety café table and two wrought iron chairs. It’s looking out into the backyard, a rather gloomy and not exactly clean - and definitely smelly - affair but at least you can actually understand what your opposite is saying and the constant noise from the street in front of the house is a little dulled.
“So,” he says and casually saunters over to her, waving his bottle of booze at her, “glasses or bottle tonight?”
“Neither,” she simply says and sticks a mug of coffee in his hand while simultaneously taking the bottle out of the other.
He makes a face. “Stick in the mud.”
However, he doesn’t continue to criticize her action, knowing full well that she’ll only give him one of those looks that will make him feel like he didn’t turn in his homework on time and just makes his way over to the balcony, taking his usual place. It’s a damp and dark night and he can hear the sounds of TSN Airfield in the distance. Taking a sip from his mug, he can’t help but grin. Damn, she still makes a helluva cup of coffee.
He has known Elizabeth since May 1942, when they’d carted them from Daws Hill to London for some diplomatic function or other. He’d been a green Lieutenant, part of VIII Bomber Command and absolutely positive that he was invincible and she’d been an embassy clerk, straining against the barriers the Foreign Office put on women in those years. They’d just shared one dance and they’d never had had any intention of deepening the acquaintance but somehow they’d kept running into each other. By the time the next war had come rolling around, he was almost disappointed to hear that she’d gotten married and had had to leave the Foreign Service.
And then her husband had gotten himself killed in a helicopter crash on his way to one of the MASH units up in the Korean highlands that had needed a dentist for some reason or other and three months later she’d been back in the Service, working in the embassy in Seoul. He’s never gotten up the nerve to ask if that had been her preferred coping strategy or if she’d just been waiting to get back into the game.
Twenty-four years. He has known Elizabeth Weir Wallace for twenty-four years now and he still tries to be nonchalant when she puts her mug on the table and sits down opposite him, saying, “Okay, John. What’s the matter with you?”
He raises his eyebrows. “What, I can’t just visit my favorite Foreign Service officer without a special reason?”
“John Sheppard,” she says with that wry and vaguely flirty look that has been driving him mad for as long as he has known her, “I have seen you with your pants down more than once, figuratively and literally. You really think you can hide anything from me?”
Damn, that’s just not fair. Most of all because she’s right, both about having seen him with his pants down - that one time she and her boss visited RAF High Wycombe and they’d entered the medical building in the exact same moment that he’d had to cross that corridor from one examination room to the next with nothing more than a hospital gown had been especially embarrassing - and about him not being able to hide anything from her. The first person to learn about the engagement that Nancy had cancelled just a month before he could get back home from his 1948/49 tour in Berlin had been Elizabeth and it hadn’t been because he’d told her about that.
He smirks. “I can still try, can’t I?”
She gives him a completely serious look and takes a sip from her coffee. “What’s going on, Colonel?”
Right. Shit’s getting serious if she’s using his rank without any sarcasm in her voice and he feels himself yearning for one of those cigarettes Cadman keeps smoking. But he quit when Nancy and he got engaged and he’s gonna stay with that, for whatever stupid reason he doesn’t really like to investigate. So instead of pulling out a cig and lighting it, he puts his boots up on the railing of Elizabeth’s balcony and decides to be honest with her. She won’t stop nagging, anyway.
People never believe him that she can be terribly bullheaded when she really wants to know something but he still has no idea what she’s actually doing at the embassy and he already figured in the Forties that “embassy clerk” most probably was just a more harmless word for “OSS operative”. Ever since Moore and DeLisle were the only ones who didn’t look much surprised when she once made her way into Le Van Loc, he’s pretty sure that she’s not an unknown quantity at the CIA, either. Of course she won’t stop nagging. “It’s Lorne.”
You know, one of the good things of having known each other for such a long time is that more often than not, it only takes two words to explain an entire clusterfuck. “Still brooding over his brother-in-law’s death?”
Yeah, if it were just that. “Worse.” She raises an eyebrow, and it’s amazing that this is all she needs to show him for him to know that she’s genuinely interested in whatever he has to say. “He turned from brooding to aggressive.”
“Sorry to hear that.” And he knows that she is. After Nancy broke off their engagement in 1949 and fucking got married to his brother only six months later, Elizabeth Weir is the only woman, the only person whom he lets past his defenses. Sometimes he has a sneaking suspicion that it’s the same with her, ever since Wallace got himself killed. “Did he assault anyone?”
He can’t help but snort. “Hell yeah.” He knows he shouldn’t be cussing around a lady like Elizabeth but damn, it’s not helpful that she always takes it in stride. “Sergeant Baker, one of the assholes that kept bothering his Sergeant and a couple more of my black Airmen.”
She shrugs and he’s almost positive that he knows what she’ll say next. “I’m sure whatever Baker did, it was worth getting thrashed for.”
Yep, there it is. Elizabeth was always fervently liberal, always advocating to sort things out without violence but never above at least considering to use force when talking didn’t get anyone anywhere. There’s a reason he always finds her again in a war zone; one beyond her probably being more than just one Foreign Service officer of many. He sighs. “Nah, he didn’t thrash him.” Although he’d probably have found it hard not to applaud Lorne if he had. “Just pushed him into a wall and threatened to kill him when he caught Baker insulting his Sergeant.”
That gets him a vaguely amused look and raised eyebrows. “And you didn’t give him a medal?”
Of course not, although he wished he could have. As it is, he now has to find a way to both protect Lorne against any retaliation he might get from Baker’s equally racist piece of shit superior officer and make sure they don’t find a burning cross or worse in front of Meyers’s quarters. Or in Meyers’s quarters. He shakes his head. “No, I left him with his WAC reporter to sort it out.”
She smirks. Elizabeth Weir Wallace actually smirks, wry amusement written all across her face. “Next best thing, of course.”
He tries to give her his best impression of an RAF officer, the one he learned in three years in High Wycombe and could always make her laugh with. “Of course, dear.”
As predicted, it makes her snort with laughter and as always seeing the refined Foreign Service officer she usually plays do something so decidedly unladylike makes him want to do decidedly indecent things to her. And by God, with her. Jesus fucking Christ.
At least she does him the favor of sobering up pretty fast and ask something as difficult as, “Do you think they’re in love?”
Helluva question, that one. It’s been going on for what, three months now, maybe even longer. And yeah, Lorne didn’t actually think he could fool anyone with that “Keep away the WAC from me if you know what’s good for you” act while simultaneously making sure he was the only available option whenever the Lieutenant needed a ride, did he now? Cadman… God, Cadman could make no one believe that she didn’t realize that she practically had season tickets to Lorne’s chopper. Why they started sleeping with each other only three months ago was, is and will forever remain one of the universe’s greatest mysteries to him. A little helplessly, he shrugs. “Damned if I know, Liz.”
Usually, she would let it go at this point but today something must have bitten her because she keeps on insisting, “Yes, but do you think they are?”
He wonders where that is suddenly coming from because he has no idea why she might be interested in the love lives of two officers that are more mere acquaintances than anything else to her. For a crazy, stupid moment of wishful thinking he even wonders if they’re still talking about Lorne and Cadman here. “I kind of hope they aren’t. Love’s got no place in a combat zone.”
“No, I imagine it doesn’t.” It doesn’t surprise him that she’d say that. What does surprise him is the tone she said it in. A little distractedly and disappointedly, something you don’t get to hear from Elizabeth Weir Wallace, ever.
One of her fingers - the ring finger, the one where the ring Wallace put on it used to sit until about ten years ago - of her left hand rhythmically taps on the table, nail on metal, making it sound like a telegraph sending a message in Morse and he makes the conscious decision not to listen too closely.
Instead, he looks at her, really looks at her for the first time in probably years. He doesn’t even know when he stopped looking at her; maybe when he got engaged to Nancy or when she got married to Wallace or when they were suddenly both free again and the possibilities of that made him choke whenever he tried thinking about them.
Maybe it was when he decided he didn’t want to see curls that still make all the Marines on TSN think that they just hollered after a twenty-year-old and the hands that always remind him of that first and only dance in May 1942 and the legs that will never cease killing him. At some point, he decided he just didn’t want to, couldn’t see all that anymore or he’d do something exceedingly stupid, something that had the potential to ruin a twenty-four year friendship. Just thinking about that feels way worse than flying SAR under RPG and small arms fire, in a moonless night, with his co-pilot passed out from a bullet wound.
“Well, then, it’s glasses after all, I guess.” Mh? He blinks. “I’m still not drinking straight from the bottle, Sheppard.” God, she’s beautiful when she’s being all sardonic and superior. He yet again manages to clear his throat and not tell her I love you.
Instead he calls after her, “Just don’t tell me ever again that I’m “seducing” you to drink, Weir!” Her laughter drifts over from the kitchenette and once again he’s well aware of the fact that he’s probably the only one who can get away with calling her by her maiden name. He just wonders if she’s aware of that as well.
She comes back to the balcony, setting two glasses and a bottle of booze - definitely not the cheap rotgut he’d waved at her earlier, as it’s actually in a cut glass bottle - down on the table and then sits back down. Almost methodically, she fills their glasses and then raises hers. Following suit, he clinks his glass to hers.
“To war zones.”
“To war zones.”
It’s been the same toast, ever since London 1945, VE-Day, the same ritual, sometimes in company just like in London or in Berlin 1948, sometimes just the two of them, like in Seoul 1953 or Washington D.C. 1962. At some point, they always end up on a balcony or in a restaurant or by a river, clinking glasses and toasting to war zones. If he’s honest, those are the only moments that make going to war still bearable after twenty-four years of wars and crises and “police actions”. He’s not going to ruin that by something as stupid as falling in love in a combat zone.
Or rather by admitting to himself that he fell in love long ago, in a different time, a different combat zone, with a twenty-year-old overachiever Radcliffe graduate trying to make her way in the men’s world of Foreign Service and just kept on loving her to this very day, because he simply doesn’t know how to stop.
And that’s why he doesn’t get up and leave, never to come back, as he should. That’s why he just keeps sitting here, with his feet up on the railing, drinking her booze and staying far too long to keep to his required sleeping hours. He’d just spend them with nightmares and time not spend with Elizabeth is time wasted, anyway, so what the hell. No one really needs sleep, after all but damn, does he need to spend time with Elizabeth. And he’s very intent on making the most of it, even in a fucking combat zone. What’s left to do when you just can’t stop loving someone, anyway?
~*~
TBC in No Reason To Get Excited (The Thief He Kindly Spoke).
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: T
Genres: het
Summary: It's Vietnam 1966 and Colonel John Sheppard goes to visit an old friend.
A/N: So. Sparky. OMG. Like, the first time ever I'm writing this, as I just realized. Over five years of writing Stargate and I never even once wrote Sparky. So, first try and it's more implied than actual relationship but anyway... what do you think? I always found Elizabeth extremely complex to write and I hope I got her dialogue right. Um. Opinions, anyone?
PS.: You can see the other finished stories here.
( Kennedy Made Him Believe (We Could Do Much More) )
( We'll Dance Until Morning ('Til There's Just You And Me) )
( With No Direction Home (Like a Complete Unknown) )
So I Came in Here (And Your Long-Time Curse Hurts)
“It was raining from the first
And I was dying there of thirst
So I came in here
And your long-time curse hurts
But what’s worse
Is this pain in here
I can’t stay in here.”
Bob Dylan, “Just Like a Woman”
He knows he shouldn’t be here. He knows he should be back at the base, pouring over paperwork and working out a way to keep his XO from getting his ass fried for the little stunt he pulled an hour ago. And yet, the first thing he did after keeping Lorne from beating the crap out of that little shit Baker was commandeering the next best vehicle he could find and take it to a little backstreet apartment complex in the expatriate quarter of Saigon.
So here he is, yet again. Standing in front of Elizabeth’s door, waiting for her to open it and for the hundredth time wondering if this will be the day she’ll have decided that she won’t put up with him anymore.
“Good evening, John.”
Obviously, it isn’t.
He smiles. “Hi, Liz.” She gives him a deadpan look - Jesus Christ, is it a fucking requirement for women to be able to do that with their face to be allowed to go to ‘Nam? - and crosses her arms in front of her chest, leaning against the doorframe. He holds up the bottle in his hand. “I, uh, brought booze?”
At that, she rolls her eyes and makes a mock invitational gesture and he follows her inside her dingy apartment. There’s only one bed/living room, a bathroom and a kitchenette and a lazily rotating fan on the ceiling. And, possibly, his favorite place in all of ‘Nam: the tiny balcony that only fits a French looking rickety café table and two wrought iron chairs. It’s looking out into the backyard, a rather gloomy and not exactly clean - and definitely smelly - affair but at least you can actually understand what your opposite is saying and the constant noise from the street in front of the house is a little dulled.
“So,” he says and casually saunters over to her, waving his bottle of booze at her, “glasses or bottle tonight?”
“Neither,” she simply says and sticks a mug of coffee in his hand while simultaneously taking the bottle out of the other.
He makes a face. “Stick in the mud.”
However, he doesn’t continue to criticize her action, knowing full well that she’ll only give him one of those looks that will make him feel like he didn’t turn in his homework on time and just makes his way over to the balcony, taking his usual place. It’s a damp and dark night and he can hear the sounds of TSN Airfield in the distance. Taking a sip from his mug, he can’t help but grin. Damn, she still makes a helluva cup of coffee.
He has known Elizabeth since May 1942, when they’d carted them from Daws Hill to London for some diplomatic function or other. He’d been a green Lieutenant, part of VIII Bomber Command and absolutely positive that he was invincible and she’d been an embassy clerk, straining against the barriers the Foreign Office put on women in those years. They’d just shared one dance and they’d never had had any intention of deepening the acquaintance but somehow they’d kept running into each other. By the time the next war had come rolling around, he was almost disappointed to hear that she’d gotten married and had had to leave the Foreign Service.
And then her husband had gotten himself killed in a helicopter crash on his way to one of the MASH units up in the Korean highlands that had needed a dentist for some reason or other and three months later she’d been back in the Service, working in the embassy in Seoul. He’s never gotten up the nerve to ask if that had been her preferred coping strategy or if she’d just been waiting to get back into the game.
Twenty-four years. He has known Elizabeth Weir Wallace for twenty-four years now and he still tries to be nonchalant when she puts her mug on the table and sits down opposite him, saying, “Okay, John. What’s the matter with you?”
He raises his eyebrows. “What, I can’t just visit my favorite Foreign Service officer without a special reason?”
“John Sheppard,” she says with that wry and vaguely flirty look that has been driving him mad for as long as he has known her, “I have seen you with your pants down more than once, figuratively and literally. You really think you can hide anything from me?”
Damn, that’s just not fair. Most of all because she’s right, both about having seen him with his pants down - that one time she and her boss visited RAF High Wycombe and they’d entered the medical building in the exact same moment that he’d had to cross that corridor from one examination room to the next with nothing more than a hospital gown had been especially embarrassing - and about him not being able to hide anything from her. The first person to learn about the engagement that Nancy had cancelled just a month before he could get back home from his 1948/49 tour in Berlin had been Elizabeth and it hadn’t been because he’d told her about that.
He smirks. “I can still try, can’t I?”
She gives him a completely serious look and takes a sip from her coffee. “What’s going on, Colonel?”
Right. Shit’s getting serious if she’s using his rank without any sarcasm in her voice and he feels himself yearning for one of those cigarettes Cadman keeps smoking. But he quit when Nancy and he got engaged and he’s gonna stay with that, for whatever stupid reason he doesn’t really like to investigate. So instead of pulling out a cig and lighting it, he puts his boots up on the railing of Elizabeth’s balcony and decides to be honest with her. She won’t stop nagging, anyway.
People never believe him that she can be terribly bullheaded when she really wants to know something but he still has no idea what she’s actually doing at the embassy and he already figured in the Forties that “embassy clerk” most probably was just a more harmless word for “OSS operative”. Ever since Moore and DeLisle were the only ones who didn’t look much surprised when she once made her way into Le Van Loc, he’s pretty sure that she’s not an unknown quantity at the CIA, either. Of course she won’t stop nagging. “It’s Lorne.”
You know, one of the good things of having known each other for such a long time is that more often than not, it only takes two words to explain an entire clusterfuck. “Still brooding over his brother-in-law’s death?”
Yeah, if it were just that. “Worse.” She raises an eyebrow, and it’s amazing that this is all she needs to show him for him to know that she’s genuinely interested in whatever he has to say. “He turned from brooding to aggressive.”
“Sorry to hear that.” And he knows that she is. After Nancy broke off their engagement in 1949 and fucking got married to his brother only six months later, Elizabeth Weir is the only woman, the only person whom he lets past his defenses. Sometimes he has a sneaking suspicion that it’s the same with her, ever since Wallace got himself killed. “Did he assault anyone?”
He can’t help but snort. “Hell yeah.” He knows he shouldn’t be cussing around a lady like Elizabeth but damn, it’s not helpful that she always takes it in stride. “Sergeant Baker, one of the assholes that kept bothering his Sergeant and a couple more of my black Airmen.”
She shrugs and he’s almost positive that he knows what she’ll say next. “I’m sure whatever Baker did, it was worth getting thrashed for.”
Yep, there it is. Elizabeth was always fervently liberal, always advocating to sort things out without violence but never above at least considering to use force when talking didn’t get anyone anywhere. There’s a reason he always finds her again in a war zone; one beyond her probably being more than just one Foreign Service officer of many. He sighs. “Nah, he didn’t thrash him.” Although he’d probably have found it hard not to applaud Lorne if he had. “Just pushed him into a wall and threatened to kill him when he caught Baker insulting his Sergeant.”
That gets him a vaguely amused look and raised eyebrows. “And you didn’t give him a medal?”
Of course not, although he wished he could have. As it is, he now has to find a way to both protect Lorne against any retaliation he might get from Baker’s equally racist piece of shit superior officer and make sure they don’t find a burning cross or worse in front of Meyers’s quarters. Or in Meyers’s quarters. He shakes his head. “No, I left him with his WAC reporter to sort it out.”
She smirks. Elizabeth Weir Wallace actually smirks, wry amusement written all across her face. “Next best thing, of course.”
He tries to give her his best impression of an RAF officer, the one he learned in three years in High Wycombe and could always make her laugh with. “Of course, dear.”
As predicted, it makes her snort with laughter and as always seeing the refined Foreign Service officer she usually plays do something so decidedly unladylike makes him want to do decidedly indecent things to her. And by God, with her. Jesus fucking Christ.
At least she does him the favor of sobering up pretty fast and ask something as difficult as, “Do you think they’re in love?”
Helluva question, that one. It’s been going on for what, three months now, maybe even longer. And yeah, Lorne didn’t actually think he could fool anyone with that “Keep away the WAC from me if you know what’s good for you” act while simultaneously making sure he was the only available option whenever the Lieutenant needed a ride, did he now? Cadman… God, Cadman could make no one believe that she didn’t realize that she practically had season tickets to Lorne’s chopper. Why they started sleeping with each other only three months ago was, is and will forever remain one of the universe’s greatest mysteries to him. A little helplessly, he shrugs. “Damned if I know, Liz.”
Usually, she would let it go at this point but today something must have bitten her because she keeps on insisting, “Yes, but do you think they are?”
He wonders where that is suddenly coming from because he has no idea why she might be interested in the love lives of two officers that are more mere acquaintances than anything else to her. For a crazy, stupid moment of wishful thinking he even wonders if they’re still talking about Lorne and Cadman here. “I kind of hope they aren’t. Love’s got no place in a combat zone.”
“No, I imagine it doesn’t.” It doesn’t surprise him that she’d say that. What does surprise him is the tone she said it in. A little distractedly and disappointedly, something you don’t get to hear from Elizabeth Weir Wallace, ever.
One of her fingers - the ring finger, the one where the ring Wallace put on it used to sit until about ten years ago - of her left hand rhythmically taps on the table, nail on metal, making it sound like a telegraph sending a message in Morse and he makes the conscious decision not to listen too closely.
Instead, he looks at her, really looks at her for the first time in probably years. He doesn’t even know when he stopped looking at her; maybe when he got engaged to Nancy or when she got married to Wallace or when they were suddenly both free again and the possibilities of that made him choke whenever he tried thinking about them.
Maybe it was when he decided he didn’t want to see curls that still make all the Marines on TSN think that they just hollered after a twenty-year-old and the hands that always remind him of that first and only dance in May 1942 and the legs that will never cease killing him. At some point, he decided he just didn’t want to, couldn’t see all that anymore or he’d do something exceedingly stupid, something that had the potential to ruin a twenty-four year friendship. Just thinking about that feels way worse than flying SAR under RPG and small arms fire, in a moonless night, with his co-pilot passed out from a bullet wound.
“Well, then, it’s glasses after all, I guess.” Mh? He blinks. “I’m still not drinking straight from the bottle, Sheppard.” God, she’s beautiful when she’s being all sardonic and superior. He yet again manages to clear his throat and not tell her I love you.
Instead he calls after her, “Just don’t tell me ever again that I’m “seducing” you to drink, Weir!” Her laughter drifts over from the kitchenette and once again he’s well aware of the fact that he’s probably the only one who can get away with calling her by her maiden name. He just wonders if she’s aware of that as well.
She comes back to the balcony, setting two glasses and a bottle of booze - definitely not the cheap rotgut he’d waved at her earlier, as it’s actually in a cut glass bottle - down on the table and then sits back down. Almost methodically, she fills their glasses and then raises hers. Following suit, he clinks his glass to hers.
“To war zones.”
“To war zones.”
It’s been the same toast, ever since London 1945, VE-Day, the same ritual, sometimes in company just like in London or in Berlin 1948, sometimes just the two of them, like in Seoul 1953 or Washington D.C. 1962. At some point, they always end up on a balcony or in a restaurant or by a river, clinking glasses and toasting to war zones. If he’s honest, those are the only moments that make going to war still bearable after twenty-four years of wars and crises and “police actions”. He’s not going to ruin that by something as stupid as falling in love in a combat zone.
Or rather by admitting to himself that he fell in love long ago, in a different time, a different combat zone, with a twenty-year-old overachiever Radcliffe graduate trying to make her way in the men’s world of Foreign Service and just kept on loving her to this very day, because he simply doesn’t know how to stop.
And that’s why he doesn’t get up and leave, never to come back, as he should. That’s why he just keeps sitting here, with his feet up on the railing, drinking her booze and staying far too long to keep to his required sleeping hours. He’d just spend them with nightmares and time not spend with Elizabeth is time wasted, anyway, so what the hell. No one really needs sleep, after all but damn, does he need to spend time with Elizabeth. And he’s very intent on making the most of it, even in a fucking combat zone. What’s left to do when you just can’t stop loving someone, anyway?
~*~
TBC in No Reason To Get Excited (The Thief He Kindly Spoke).