With a suffocating sense of déjà vu, Harri puts on a smart outfit, stares at her own tired face in the bathroom mirror, and goes uptown to the Hill. Knocks, stares down an underbutler, and is shown into the solarium.
Vespidine is muttering to herself, the week's newspapers stacked at her elbow, mechanical pencil racing over a notebook. She pauses to absently scoop up a spoonful of congee, dimly registers the presence of another person, lifts her eyes, blinks, and nervelessly drops the spoon onto her notes.
"Harika?" she says, incredulous and dreading.
"Hello, Vespidine," Harri says; tired, prickly with sweat from the uphill climb, tone carefully controlled.
Vespidine's eyes are fixed on her; wide, unblinking, desperate. "I don't mean to sound ungrateful to see you," the elf says, strained, "but...you wouldn't come here, if things were alright. What—"
She catches something in Harri's expression, and is on her feet in flash.
"Who," she amends, fists closing, and Harri considers, just for a chilled moment, lying.
"Cos came to see me," she says instead, and Vespidine makes a dangerous noise in her throat, opens her hands, then clenches them into tighter, white-knuckled fists.
"Did she hurt you?"
"She only came to talk," Harri says, and Vespidine shakes her head, a sharp snap to the left, to the right, back to staring like Harri's the only thing in the room.
"I didn't ask how, Harika," she bites out. "I asked if."
Harri doesn't want to answer honestly; but the same cold, frightened, whispering feeling says: she'll know if you lie, and Vespidine is not Cosimisa. Cosimisa's anger, Harri knows already, knows what's necessary to navigate it, the ways it might be meted out, how to judge how bad things are.
"You are off limits," Vespidine says, slightly louder. "You know this, Harika, I told you this, Cosimisa understands that I cannot be disrespected with impunity—"
"That's the problem," Harri says, standing very still while also making herself as small and unobtrusive as she can. "That's exactly the problem, Vespidine, you can't, and your family are prepared to answer any perceived slights to you, if you refuse to. I don't—" and she falters, drops her eyes to the floor. Big weepy eyes, Cosimisa had spat, and over and over, a thousand other times and epithets: pathetic, begging, cringing, clinging, pleading, fawning eyes. "I don't want to be made an example of."
"I am working on it," Vespidine says, coiling tighter in on herself, furious still, but now defensively tinged.
"Cos seems to think they're out of patience for that." Harri chews her lip. "And it does you no good, either, if they decide you can't be trusted to enforce your own reputation."
"I said—" Vespidine swallows and turns her face away. "I said I'd keep you out of it."
Harri wants to soothe her. Harri wants to shake her. "You already admitted you can't," she says. "Against nearly everyone, but not against your family. You're not head of it, yet, and you can't promise that until you are. You can't let me out of this while they won't let you." She takes a deep breath, and gentles her voice. "Since you can't do that, I need you to protect me, Vespidine, not stand on your pride about it while they ruin me."
Vespidine takes a deep breath, still not looking at Harri, and then lets it out and takes another. "There's some sort of talk," she says eventually, clipped and evidently struggling with the words, "some nonsense about you and someone from work—" and Harri thinks pride and wonders exactly what, exactly, Vespidine has been thinking while she stiffly pretends she can keep from meddling.
"I'm hardly going to stop talking shop over sandwiches," she says firmly. "If the problem is that gossips see your indecorosa having lunch, but not with you, then I'm afraid we'll just have to give them enough to look at to say the correct sort of things about."
Vespidine looks at her, then.
"Take me to lunch," Harri says. "You'd know where better than I do. Be seen with me. Nothing outwardly scandalous, but made just enough so because it's with — your mistress. Enough of a sacrifice to the gossip columns that I can live, Vespidine — please," and the elf stares and stares at her.
"Are you free now?" she says finally, hoarsely, and Harri nods. "Very well. Give me a moment."
Harri nods, and gingerly slips into a chair, folding her hands in her lap; and Vespidine finally tears her eyes away and leaves the room, shoulders tensely knotted.
After Vespidine returns — her loose linen shirt changed for one in dressy dark brocade, sleeves rolled to the elbow in a considered show of casualness — she drives them down into the teeming city, opens the door and helps Harri out of the car, and then hesitates a moment before gesturing a little toward Harri's hand.
"May I?" she says quietly, and then, instead of taking Harri's offered hand, instead takes her wrist in the very tips of her fingers and walks her along, gentle points of contact over her thrumming pulse, making Harri's skin feel tight and hot and shivery.
They stroll, entirely leisurely, across one of the city's small, dense public gardens, amidst the other people promenading a leisure day beneath the sun; sit at an outdoor table in a moderately discreet side street and eat a light lunch. Vespidine murmurs a little light conversation, heart clearly not in it, before again checking, "May I?"
They take a winding route; Vespidine stops them at a few street vendors, buys a bright enamel clip and carefully slides it into Harri's hair, pays a man with frostburned hands to conjure them frozen treats.
"I'm sorry," she murmurs, as they near the street where the motor-car is parked.
"For what?" Harri says, gesturing with her nibbled waffle cone. "A walk in the park? Lunch? Gelato?"
Vespidine shakes her head, and Harri sighs.
"Don't," she says softly. "You're protecting me, and — you're better company than Cos. And I know that none of this," and she gestures again, "carries the same kind of price, with you."
Vespidine inhales sharply, but says nothing, and they arrive at her parking spot.
"I'm going to walk home," Harri says. "We should — probably do this again, soon?"
"Whenever you'd like," Vespidine says quietly.
Harri pops the last of the cone into her mouth and crunches it, watching the elf lean back against the motor-car, hands in her pockets, looking back. "Thank you," she says finally, and steps in quickly, puts a hand on Vespidine's firm arm for balance as she sways to plant a kiss on her cheek.
When she steps back, equally quick, Vespidine's eyes are closed and open only slowly; she has an intensely serious look on her face.
"Don't walk all the way up the Hill next time," the elf says hoarsely. "Just ask. As you say—" and she takes one hand from her pocket and unlatches the door behind her, without taking her eyes off Harri, "with me, the price is not the same."
Harri shrugs and doesn't nod; just waves a little as Vespidine drives away.
