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It is, just barely, a cold morning in Palisade. Sunlight streams in through the curtains, a milky sort of pale-green color; before his eyes, Talbot watches dust motes dance through slats of light created where a gap in the curtains allows light to pass through.

He is shirtless to the waist, having just risen from bed several minutes before. It is cold enough in the room that goose bumps stand up on his skin, still tanned except where his recently-removed bandages had been. There his skin is as white as milk, oddly green in the light, with the look of something left to sit in the shade and grow cold. Talbot himself hates it, perhaps more so than the two puckered scars the musketball left him, still reddish-pink; one on his chest like a third n****e and its match slightly lower on his back.

It still hurts to move, but at least the bandages are off, and now, he tells himself, he can return to the Tempest and make berth somewhere else, like he has been planning to do for these last few months. He still clings to the notion that he will be able to somehow simply bundle Cesambre aboard the ship and wheel the galley out of the harbor as if nothing has changed. Every time he thinks about it, he gets a curious gnawing sensation in his gut. He invariably looks up from his thoughts to see the doe staring at him with an expression of reproach that is by now far too well-known.

In those times he cannot tell whether the sensation in his stomach is because of Cesambre's reproach or because he knows he is lying to himself. It is a task he is not yet capable of doing, choosing between his Guardian and his ship.

So he ignores it.

He returns to his task: his focus shifts not from the dust motes in front of him, but to his expression in the mirror, slightly wavy in the silvered glass. The silence is broken by the dull rasping sound of a straight razor gliding over his skin, and he cants his chin carefully up to start removing the weeks' worth of stubble that had grown on his jaw and neck. Shaving with bandages wrapping your neck had been damnably awkward. He still has a myriad of small cuts from where he had been careless with his razor.

In the reflection in the mirror is a scene behind him: a rumpled bed, still unmade (it is so, so early), and a figure in it, painted mostly in broad swathes of shadow: here a suggestion of an arm, there dark hair. He knows that Elias will not wake for some time yet. He has never been one to wake early. Talbot cannot help himself. And besides, there is nothing in the cabinets, and a man has to eat.

Reality snaps back into place. Talbot is thrown out of his reverie by Elias's chatter and nearly cuts himself with the razor, and a fine thing it would have been: a nice long cut directly across his throat. It makes him twitch; a moment later he sets the razor delicately on Elias's sink (not clean enough by his estimation; this man needs a maid) and turns around, slowly.

He glances to the clock that hangs on the wall, dark eyes squinting as he focuses -- the halflight is still just that -- and then exits the bathroom after grabbing a washcloth. Not for him, for Elias's bleeding nose. "Just past six." Which is likely in a realm of earliness that Elias is entirely unused to, and may not have known existed. "Here," he adds, "and your virtue, my dear, was gone long ago, if my memory is correct." He permits himself a droll half-smile. Freshly shaven and with the halflight disguising the grey in his hair, he looks much younger.

Talbot snorts, the inelegant sound startled out of him. "Ever again? However will I live without availing myself of your virtue. That was not the song you sung last night." And here, he grins, broadly, which is rare for him. It is gone as soon as it appears. "Do you need ice for you nose?" If it has bled through the washcloth it is a formidable nosebleed indeed. Talbot is well aware of the severity of Elias's peculiar ailments, though they somehow never stop him from stepping into the boxing ring. He glances to the door, and then returns a sideways look to the other man, "Or breakfast."

After a pause long enough to convey exactly what he thinks of the too-casual question, Talbot nods and then looks around for one of his shirts. His skin is a patchwork of tanned by the sun and white as a newborn's bottom. He feels better with a shirt on, though that may as much be because he is a gentleman as because the removal of the bandages make him feel curiously soft and vulnerable. He finds it tangled among the bedsheets, tugs it on, and for the moment leaves it unbuttoned. "You ought to eat. Something, at least." As if it is a choice between toast and ship's hardtack and salt pork. He shrugs, and then frowns, waiting for a retort.

Talbot favors him with a withering look, but then does as he's asked -- pauses a moment to at least button his shirt up to a semblance of something proper, buttoning his shirt, though he leaves it untucked -- and opens the door. The outside of the bedroom is bright, and he squints against the light, but he is careful to keep his body blocking the view of the interior of the bedroom, and his expression carefully neutral. It would be all he needed for someone to see Elias artfully arranged on top of the bed, naked among the tousled sheets. If that got out -- .. it doesn't bear thinking about. He hopes the scratching noise was from a Guardian.

Talbot's expression grows briefly distant: the hallmark of a Chosen attempting to communicate with their Guardian, or at the very least figure out where they are. He comes back to himself a scant second later, looking quietly at Elias. His own expression is quiet. "Outside, in the park." Which is at least a half mile from the apartment. "She did not deign to make an appearance." Which -- is both true, and not. Talbot has become an absolute master of half-truths where his Guardian is concerned. His stomach turns slowly over.

He extends a hand towards Halflight, done in the way one might cautiously extend their hand to a strange dog or cat. "Do you think," he murmurs, voice returned to its typical mildness, strange for someone who can roar over an entire crowd without effort, "That your tenants would look at you oddly over a Chosen? If some are to be believed," and here he stops, thoughtful.

How best to tell Elias that according to some -- Maeve, for one -- he ought to be awarded a medal of honor? Elias's choosing was not ideal.

"She gives me that same stare," Talbot says, watching Halflight scrape his antlers -- and then turns away, searching the room in a halfhearted attempt to locate the rest of his clothing. Like any good man of Palisade, Talbot dresses in layers whether it is sweltering or freezing outside. He picks through the sheets, finds his neckcloth, and stands with it in his hands.

"I have heard, in Palisade," he begins, "--that there are some who believe in the Old Ways that think that a Chosen ought to be treated differently. Better. If they are to be believed," and here his voice gains an odd bitter edge, which means, if Elias notices it, that Talbot is speaking about himself, "I ought to have been made commander of the bloody fleet."