Fic: Crash And Burn And Then Some (Heroes)
Mar. 7th, 2007 01:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apocalypsosTitle: Crash And Burn And Then Some
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Heroes
Spoilers: "Parasite"
Warnings: None
Rating: PG
*
Crash And Burn And Then Some
*
The ride from JFK in the car is taken up with an awkward silence. Nathan spends most of it staring at the patches of blue sky he can see between the buildings, breathing in and out, trying not to freak out.
He suspects he could snap at everyone who crosses his path in the next day or so and be well within his rights. Simone is dead. Peter has taken vanishing into thin air in annoyingly literal terms. Linderman is … well, Linderman.
When the car arrives at his building Nathan exhales, hard and ragged, as if he hasn’t in days.
The awkward silence continues on the elevator ride up to the penthouse. He pulls off his sunglasses and slips them into his pocket. He undoes the buttons of his jacket and runs his hand through his hair, leaving what he’s positive is a rumpled mess in their wake.
He glances around the elevator once or twice, a newly developed habit, as if half-expecting to spot Peter blending into the wallpaper.
The elevator opens to an eerily silent entranceway, and it takes Nathan a long moment to remember that they’d given the staff the day off today so the exterminator could take a look at the place. Somewhere upstairs the boys can be heard playing some game with crashing noises and gunfire sounds and happy screeches. They’re not allowed video games but no one ever bothered to make rules about their imaginary escapades.
“How did it go?”
Nathan starts as Heidi rolls into the room, her smile wide and brilliant. Just the sight of her is enough to relax some of the tension in his shoulders, taking some of the weight away. The boys have her smile, and he’s always been quietly grateful about that.
“Better than I expected,” he says, bending to brush a quick kiss across her lips. He doesn’t bother to mention the fact that he’s standing here, alive and shaken and blackmailed, is probably the best-case scenario there could have been. “How have things been here? The kids starting World War III up there?”
“Or something kind of like it,” she says. “The exterminator’s almost done sweeping the downstairs. Oh, and your mother’s waiting in your office.”
“She’s not rearranging my desk, is she?”
“I made sure to handcuff her to the bookcase,” Heidi says dryly, then rolls past on her way to the kitchen.
Nathan watches her go before heading for his office, loosening his tie as he walks past the exterminator. The guy in question -- tall, beefy, and stoic, just like Nathan had expected from the start -- takes it as a signal to tighten the knot of his own tie, shutting off the device in his hands when he’s done.
“You’re clear, sir.”
Nathan nods, breathing a little easier. He hadn’t expected them to go to the trouble of bugging his damn house, but he hadn’t been about to take that chance.
The FBI agent heads off to retrieve his things as Nathan walks into his office, shutting the door behind him. The doors may be shut but the windows are still wide open, letting in the honks and rumbles of the traffic below and the faint breeze from outside and the clear pristine sight of the cloudless sky. It’s stupid that that’s all it takes to make Nathan feel that much better, he thinks, but then it isn’t, not really, not at all.
“I’d say my plan worked wonderfully, don‘t you think?”
His mother’s voice rings out from behind him and Nathan stiffens. “Mother,” he says, but then he turns around and any other words he might have planned on saying die in his throat.
Angela Petrelli sits on the opposite side of the room, her legs properly crossed and a tea set on the table in front of her. And across from her …
Jesus fucking Christ.
“I think I should become an evil mastermind,” his mother declares, leaning back in her chair with a wickedly satisfied smile on her face. “I’m obviously much better at it than you would give me credit for, and any mistakes made during this whole debacle were only because some people --” She shoots the girl sitting in the other chair a look that makes a pink flush tint her cheeks. “-- simply won’t follow instructions.”
Nathan can’t do anything but stare. He feels like he’s frozen in place, like his muscles have turned to stone.
From the look on her face, Claire seems to be suffering from the same affliction.
His mother gets up then, glancing between the two of them and sighing heavily. “Well, I’m off to go see if my grandsons are done killing the bad guys yet.” She walks up to Nathan, her lips twisted in a strange soft smile, and she reaches out to pat his cheek. “Don’t say I never gave you anything.”
His mother leaves then, and Nathan’s alone with her, and he just …
He swallows. Okay, so his throat works.
“Hi,” he says.
Claire gets to her feet then, and God, she’s tiny. She’s so damn small. He gets this mental image of porcelain dolls and Barbies, of the piles of them he would have bought for her if she hadn’t --
Well.
“Hi,” she says.
Looking at her, Nathan feels a little like he’s drowning. In movies, this is where he’d sweep her into his arms and tell her how much he’d missed her, and she’d call him Daddy and say she missed him, too. But this isn’t the movies, and he wonders how long the two of them are going to stand there and stare at one another. Probably until something interrupts them, like a phone call or his mother or a bomb blowing up the entire city.
She looks down at her hands and back up at him, and there’s this wide-eyed need facing him down that’s so much like Peter all of his muscles unlock in response.
“I thought you were going to Canada,” he blurts out.
Or Mexico, he thinks. Or London or Paris or Timbuktu. Anywhere to keep her safe. Whatever it would take to keep her safe.
“I thought maybe Peter …” Claire’s voice trails off as this rather uneasy smile crosses her face. “Peter’s my uncle,” she says, as if she can’t believe it, as if it’s the bad punch line of some great cosmic joke.
Nathan can’t resist a wry smile, in spite of the fact that he has no idea where Peter is or what the hell is going on. “Yeah, I’d invest in headache medication if I were you,” he says, even though he knows better, but she grins at that and at least she gets it.
Claire tilts her head, her blond curls shifting with the movement. She’s wearing a green long-sleeved shirt and faded jeans and Converse sneakers, and he’s seen fewer things in his life that were more beautiful.
“I was there,” she blurts out. “In the trailer park.”
It takes him a second to remember. “Oh.”
“I threw a rock.”
Anther second, and … oh. That would explain it, if she were there. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Hell, I probably deserved it.”
“You didn’t pay off my mother because you didn’t want me, did you?” she asks.
Nathan takes a step, just a little one, and he suddenly realizes that he’s been taking steps along and that she’s right there, right in front of him, close enough to touch.
I had to, he wants to say. She almost got you killed. Hell, as far as I knew, she did get you killed.
“No,” he says instead. “I didn’t.”
She nods then, or shakes her head, or something in between. He can’t even tell, because all of a sudden he’s too busy hugging her, tightening his grip on her like he’s about to lose her all over again.
He hugs her because he wants to, because she wants it. He’s supposed to do this, because this is what you do when you finally meet your long-lost daughter. Life sucks and he’s being blackmailed, Peter is missing and Linderman knows.
He hugs her because it’s either this or talk and this he can handle.
Nathan tries not to think about it and holds on.
*
Nathan doesn’t know how long they stand there like that. It could be days because it feels like it in a good way, and it could be weeks because it feels like that, too, but not in a good way.
A loud knock has them both leaping backwards, glancing sheepishly towards the door as the door swings open and Heidi rolls in. A greasy pizza carton sits on her lap, a six-pack of Cokes on top of it.
“Hey, you two,” she says, flashing Claire a friendly grin that makes Nathan feel more grateful than he’d admit. “Figured you could use a little dinner. Or at least a little something resembling dinner anyway.”
Nathan hurries before she has to roll too far into the room, taking the pizza and the sodas from her lap with a muttered thanks. They exchange a look, private but loaded.
“You going to be okay?” she whispers.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he says.
She narrows her eyes at that.
“What?”
“Be nice,” she says quietly, then rolls away from him and adds in a louder voice, “I’ll just leave the two of you to get acquainted.”
She exchanges another look with Claire, tentative but warm, and Claire bites her bottom lip. For a brief moment Nathan feels like the outsider in the room, like he suddenly appeared in someone else’s home and in the middle of someone else’s conversation.
Nathan turns and opens the pizza box after Heidi leaves, taking a deep breath of the scent of peppers and mushrooms. He can feel Claire approaching behind him and almost has to resist the urge to flinch. “So,” he says with as much faked cheerfulness as he can manage, “how many pieces do you think --”
She grabs his wrist before he can reach for a slice.
“Can I show you something?” she asks him softly, and that’s when he notices it.
The silver letter opener in her hand, gripped in trembling fingers.
“You don’t have to,” he says, reaching for a slice of pizza.
Claire shakes her head, her gaze darting to the pizza in his hand. “No,” she says, and presses the point of the letter opener to her wrist. “You don’t understand --”
“I do,” he says.
She narrows her eyes, and he stares back. When she looks back down again, the letter opener is in his hand, the faint impression of the point still visible on her skin. A warm slice of pizza is there instead, dripping oil onto an office document that probably isn’t that important anyway.
“You don’t have to,” he repeats, and puts aside the letter opener to grab a slice of pizza for himself.
After all, when your mother comes to you and tells you your missing illegitimate presumed-dead daughter is invulnerable, you’re allowed to think she needs to be committed.
You know, unless you defy gravity. Then she gets a little leeway.
*
They spend the next few hours slowly making their way through the pizza and asking whatever silly question comes to mind.
Claire finds out that the day she was born he managed to get two speeding tickets on the way to the hospital and ended up getting there minutes after she was born. She learns that he hates celery as much as she does and that he gets the cook to make chili every once in a while the way Meredith used to. She discovers that before he lost her he got to hear her call him “dada,” and he won’t say it out loud but she can tell that he was grateful for it.
Nathan learns that she likes history and hates her art classes, and that she thought nothing could ever make her hate cheerleading until Homecoming rolled around. She tells him that she loved her parents, even when she found out about the adoption, even when she was so angry that she would have sworn up and down that she didn’t. He hears her say that sometimes she used to walk down the street and search the features of the men who walked past her for something she recognized from looking in the mirror, and his chest hurts so damn much.
Dim warm light from Nathan’s office carries out onto the terrace to the pair of deck chairs they’ve taken up residence in. Nathan’s long since lost his tie and jacket. Claire absently turns the tab on her empty soda can with her fingertip.
“Nathan?”
She hasn’t called him “Dad” yet, not that he’s expecting her to. Hell, he’s not looking for any miracles other than the one he’s already gotten. It’s enough.
But the hesitant tone of her voice has him on edge for the first time in a while and he glances over at her cautiously. “Yeah?”
“You know what I can do, right?”
He nods.
Claire takes a deep breath. “Meredith can set things on fire,” she says. “With her hands. You know that, too?”
He nods again, slowly this time. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see where this is going.
She lifts her gaze to his. “Can you do anything?”
There are a dozen different answers that he could give, sarcastic ones that would make her smile and roll her eyes and wouldn’t be like him at all. They’d be more like Peter, truth be told.
Peter wouldn’t lie to her, he thinks.
Correction. Peter wouldn’t lie to her, but he’d tell Nathan not to lie to her either. Not about this. This, she should know.
If there is one thing he should share with her, this is it.
“Get up,” he says, getting to his own feet as he does.
Claire tilts her head and smiles curiously at him, but he waves his hand at her to hurry up and she stands. So damn small, he thinks, in awe of her.
“Feet on mine,” he says, and reluctantly she puts the toes of her shoes on top of his.
He takes her hands, tightens his grip.
“Look up here,” he says, and lowers his head a little to catch her gaze.
She rolls her eyes at that but focuses back on his face when she’s done, looking confused for the longest of moments before understanding dawns in her eyes and she looks down.
“Oh, wow,” she says.
They float several feet in the air, hovering above the terrace. She laughs, joyous for the first time since he walked into his office, and her grin spreads wide. “Really?” she asks.
“Really,” he says, and if he can’t stop smiling he figures it’s all her fault.
He lowers them back down to the terrace, Claire giggling the whole way. When they land she stays where she is for a moment, still standing on his toes, and before he can tell her that she might want to take a step back before she cuts off all the circulation to his feet she wraps her arms around his midsection tightly.
“Thanks,” she says.
He hugs her back, not letting himself think about it too much. “You’re welcome,” he says.
This time it’s easier to let go and he has the crazy thought that maybe they’re getting better at it. Claire takes a deep breath and stares up into the night sky, then walks over to the edge of the terrace and looks over. A flash of the same fear he always gets when the boys go too close washes over him, a reflex that won’t even take into consideration that if she fell from this height she might not bounce but she’d definitely get back up again afterwards.
“I wish Peter was here,” she says quietly.
Nathan isn’t sure he was supposed to hear that, but he sticks his hands into his pockets and glances around at the shadows.
He wonders suddenly if Peter’s washed Simone’s blood from his face yet.
“Yeah,” he says, “so do I.”
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Heroes
Spoilers: "Parasite"
Warnings: None
Rating: PG
Crash And Burn And Then Some
*
The ride from JFK in the car is taken up with an awkward silence. Nathan spends most of it staring at the patches of blue sky he can see between the buildings, breathing in and out, trying not to freak out.
He suspects he could snap at everyone who crosses his path in the next day or so and be well within his rights. Simone is dead. Peter has taken vanishing into thin air in annoyingly literal terms. Linderman is … well, Linderman.
When the car arrives at his building Nathan exhales, hard and ragged, as if he hasn’t in days.
The awkward silence continues on the elevator ride up to the penthouse. He pulls off his sunglasses and slips them into his pocket. He undoes the buttons of his jacket and runs his hand through his hair, leaving what he’s positive is a rumpled mess in their wake.
He glances around the elevator once or twice, a newly developed habit, as if half-expecting to spot Peter blending into the wallpaper.
The elevator opens to an eerily silent entranceway, and it takes Nathan a long moment to remember that they’d given the staff the day off today so the exterminator could take a look at the place. Somewhere upstairs the boys can be heard playing some game with crashing noises and gunfire sounds and happy screeches. They’re not allowed video games but no one ever bothered to make rules about their imaginary escapades.
“How did it go?”
Nathan starts as Heidi rolls into the room, her smile wide and brilliant. Just the sight of her is enough to relax some of the tension in his shoulders, taking some of the weight away. The boys have her smile, and he’s always been quietly grateful about that.
“Better than I expected,” he says, bending to brush a quick kiss across her lips. He doesn’t bother to mention the fact that he’s standing here, alive and shaken and blackmailed, is probably the best-case scenario there could have been. “How have things been here? The kids starting World War III up there?”
“Or something kind of like it,” she says. “The exterminator’s almost done sweeping the downstairs. Oh, and your mother’s waiting in your office.”
“She’s not rearranging my desk, is she?”
“I made sure to handcuff her to the bookcase,” Heidi says dryly, then rolls past on her way to the kitchen.
Nathan watches her go before heading for his office, loosening his tie as he walks past the exterminator. The guy in question -- tall, beefy, and stoic, just like Nathan had expected from the start -- takes it as a signal to tighten the knot of his own tie, shutting off the device in his hands when he’s done.
“You’re clear, sir.”
Nathan nods, breathing a little easier. He hadn’t expected them to go to the trouble of bugging his damn house, but he hadn’t been about to take that chance.
The FBI agent heads off to retrieve his things as Nathan walks into his office, shutting the door behind him. The doors may be shut but the windows are still wide open, letting in the honks and rumbles of the traffic below and the faint breeze from outside and the clear pristine sight of the cloudless sky. It’s stupid that that’s all it takes to make Nathan feel that much better, he thinks, but then it isn’t, not really, not at all.
“I’d say my plan worked wonderfully, don‘t you think?”
His mother’s voice rings out from behind him and Nathan stiffens. “Mother,” he says, but then he turns around and any other words he might have planned on saying die in his throat.
Angela Petrelli sits on the opposite side of the room, her legs properly crossed and a tea set on the table in front of her. And across from her …
Jesus fucking Christ.
“I think I should become an evil mastermind,” his mother declares, leaning back in her chair with a wickedly satisfied smile on her face. “I’m obviously much better at it than you would give me credit for, and any mistakes made during this whole debacle were only because some people --” She shoots the girl sitting in the other chair a look that makes a pink flush tint her cheeks. “-- simply won’t follow instructions.”
Nathan can’t do anything but stare. He feels like he’s frozen in place, like his muscles have turned to stone.
From the look on her face, Claire seems to be suffering from the same affliction.
His mother gets up then, glancing between the two of them and sighing heavily. “Well, I’m off to go see if my grandsons are done killing the bad guys yet.” She walks up to Nathan, her lips twisted in a strange soft smile, and she reaches out to pat his cheek. “Don’t say I never gave you anything.”
His mother leaves then, and Nathan’s alone with her, and he just …
He swallows. Okay, so his throat works.
“Hi,” he says.
Claire gets to her feet then, and God, she’s tiny. She’s so damn small. He gets this mental image of porcelain dolls and Barbies, of the piles of them he would have bought for her if she hadn’t --
Well.
“Hi,” she says.
Looking at her, Nathan feels a little like he’s drowning. In movies, this is where he’d sweep her into his arms and tell her how much he’d missed her, and she’d call him Daddy and say she missed him, too. But this isn’t the movies, and he wonders how long the two of them are going to stand there and stare at one another. Probably until something interrupts them, like a phone call or his mother or a bomb blowing up the entire city.
She looks down at her hands and back up at him, and there’s this wide-eyed need facing him down that’s so much like Peter all of his muscles unlock in response.
“I thought you were going to Canada,” he blurts out.
Or Mexico, he thinks. Or London or Paris or Timbuktu. Anywhere to keep her safe. Whatever it would take to keep her safe.
“I thought maybe Peter …” Claire’s voice trails off as this rather uneasy smile crosses her face. “Peter’s my uncle,” she says, as if she can’t believe it, as if it’s the bad punch line of some great cosmic joke.
Nathan can’t resist a wry smile, in spite of the fact that he has no idea where Peter is or what the hell is going on. “Yeah, I’d invest in headache medication if I were you,” he says, even though he knows better, but she grins at that and at least she gets it.
Claire tilts her head, her blond curls shifting with the movement. She’s wearing a green long-sleeved shirt and faded jeans and Converse sneakers, and he’s seen fewer things in his life that were more beautiful.
“I was there,” she blurts out. “In the trailer park.”
It takes him a second to remember. “Oh.”
“I threw a rock.”
Anther second, and … oh. That would explain it, if she were there. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Hell, I probably deserved it.”
“You didn’t pay off my mother because you didn’t want me, did you?” she asks.
Nathan takes a step, just a little one, and he suddenly realizes that he’s been taking steps along and that she’s right there, right in front of him, close enough to touch.
I had to, he wants to say. She almost got you killed. Hell, as far as I knew, she did get you killed.
“No,” he says instead. “I didn’t.”
She nods then, or shakes her head, or something in between. He can’t even tell, because all of a sudden he’s too busy hugging her, tightening his grip on her like he’s about to lose her all over again.
He hugs her because he wants to, because she wants it. He’s supposed to do this, because this is what you do when you finally meet your long-lost daughter. Life sucks and he’s being blackmailed, Peter is missing and Linderman knows.
He hugs her because it’s either this or talk and this he can handle.
Nathan tries not to think about it and holds on.
Nathan doesn’t know how long they stand there like that. It could be days because it feels like it in a good way, and it could be weeks because it feels like that, too, but not in a good way.
A loud knock has them both leaping backwards, glancing sheepishly towards the door as the door swings open and Heidi rolls in. A greasy pizza carton sits on her lap, a six-pack of Cokes on top of it.
“Hey, you two,” she says, flashing Claire a friendly grin that makes Nathan feel more grateful than he’d admit. “Figured you could use a little dinner. Or at least a little something resembling dinner anyway.”
Nathan hurries before she has to roll too far into the room, taking the pizza and the sodas from her lap with a muttered thanks. They exchange a look, private but loaded.
“You going to be okay?” she whispers.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” he says.
She narrows her eyes at that.
“What?”
“Be nice,” she says quietly, then rolls away from him and adds in a louder voice, “I’ll just leave the two of you to get acquainted.”
She exchanges another look with Claire, tentative but warm, and Claire bites her bottom lip. For a brief moment Nathan feels like the outsider in the room, like he suddenly appeared in someone else’s home and in the middle of someone else’s conversation.
Nathan turns and opens the pizza box after Heidi leaves, taking a deep breath of the scent of peppers and mushrooms. He can feel Claire approaching behind him and almost has to resist the urge to flinch. “So,” he says with as much faked cheerfulness as he can manage, “how many pieces do you think --”
She grabs his wrist before he can reach for a slice.
“Can I show you something?” she asks him softly, and that’s when he notices it.
The silver letter opener in her hand, gripped in trembling fingers.
“You don’t have to,” he says, reaching for a slice of pizza.
Claire shakes her head, her gaze darting to the pizza in his hand. “No,” she says, and presses the point of the letter opener to her wrist. “You don’t understand --”
“I do,” he says.
She narrows her eyes, and he stares back. When she looks back down again, the letter opener is in his hand, the faint impression of the point still visible on her skin. A warm slice of pizza is there instead, dripping oil onto an office document that probably isn’t that important anyway.
“You don’t have to,” he repeats, and puts aside the letter opener to grab a slice of pizza for himself.
After all, when your mother comes to you and tells you your missing illegitimate presumed-dead daughter is invulnerable, you’re allowed to think she needs to be committed.
You know, unless you defy gravity. Then she gets a little leeway.
They spend the next few hours slowly making their way through the pizza and asking whatever silly question comes to mind.
Claire finds out that the day she was born he managed to get two speeding tickets on the way to the hospital and ended up getting there minutes after she was born. She learns that he hates celery as much as she does and that he gets the cook to make chili every once in a while the way Meredith used to. She discovers that before he lost her he got to hear her call him “dada,” and he won’t say it out loud but she can tell that he was grateful for it.
Nathan learns that she likes history and hates her art classes, and that she thought nothing could ever make her hate cheerleading until Homecoming rolled around. She tells him that she loved her parents, even when she found out about the adoption, even when she was so angry that she would have sworn up and down that she didn’t. He hears her say that sometimes she used to walk down the street and search the features of the men who walked past her for something she recognized from looking in the mirror, and his chest hurts so damn much.
Dim warm light from Nathan’s office carries out onto the terrace to the pair of deck chairs they’ve taken up residence in. Nathan’s long since lost his tie and jacket. Claire absently turns the tab on her empty soda can with her fingertip.
“Nathan?”
She hasn’t called him “Dad” yet, not that he’s expecting her to. Hell, he’s not looking for any miracles other than the one he’s already gotten. It’s enough.
But the hesitant tone of her voice has him on edge for the first time in a while and he glances over at her cautiously. “Yeah?”
“You know what I can do, right?”
He nods.
Claire takes a deep breath. “Meredith can set things on fire,” she says. “With her hands. You know that, too?”
He nods again, slowly this time. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see where this is going.
She lifts her gaze to his. “Can you do anything?”
There are a dozen different answers that he could give, sarcastic ones that would make her smile and roll her eyes and wouldn’t be like him at all. They’d be more like Peter, truth be told.
Peter wouldn’t lie to her, he thinks.
Correction. Peter wouldn’t lie to her, but he’d tell Nathan not to lie to her either. Not about this. This, she should know.
If there is one thing he should share with her, this is it.
“Get up,” he says, getting to his own feet as he does.
Claire tilts her head and smiles curiously at him, but he waves his hand at her to hurry up and she stands. So damn small, he thinks, in awe of her.
“Feet on mine,” he says, and reluctantly she puts the toes of her shoes on top of his.
He takes her hands, tightens his grip.
“Look up here,” he says, and lowers his head a little to catch her gaze.
She rolls her eyes at that but focuses back on his face when she’s done, looking confused for the longest of moments before understanding dawns in her eyes and she looks down.
“Oh, wow,” she says.
They float several feet in the air, hovering above the terrace. She laughs, joyous for the first time since he walked into his office, and her grin spreads wide. “Really?” she asks.
“Really,” he says, and if he can’t stop smiling he figures it’s all her fault.
He lowers them back down to the terrace, Claire giggling the whole way. When they land she stays where she is for a moment, still standing on his toes, and before he can tell her that she might want to take a step back before she cuts off all the circulation to his feet she wraps her arms around his midsection tightly.
“Thanks,” she says.
He hugs her back, not letting himself think about it too much. “You’re welcome,” he says.
This time it’s easier to let go and he has the crazy thought that maybe they’re getting better at it. Claire takes a deep breath and stares up into the night sky, then walks over to the edge of the terrace and looks over. A flash of the same fear he always gets when the boys go too close washes over him, a reflex that won’t even take into consideration that if she fell from this height she might not bounce but she’d definitely get back up again afterwards.
“I wish Peter was here,” she says quietly.
Nathan isn’t sure he was supposed to hear that, but he sticks his hands into his pockets and glances around at the shadows.
He wonders suddenly if Peter’s washed Simone’s blood from his face yet.
“Yeah,” he says, “so do I.”
