It's really a pity he's not trying to antagonize him, because he seems to have a natural talent for it.
Which is to say that it's a highly aggravated Michael on the bench near the veterans' monument. He's been there, papers and all, since about three, on an impulse he doesn't even define to himself (this is his territory, damn it, he won't be coerced on his own ground). His expression is the cold, forbidding one that Mordred inherited from his paternal grandfather, that autocratic glower that was always tempered, in Mordred, by his chronic shame. It isn't now.
He doesn't look up when Nathan does approach. The pen moves in quick, irritable bursts.