"I have important things to attend to, and I have no patience for politics of any kind."

Feeling irritably exposed suddenly, he creeps a bit closer - not menacingly, of course, and he looks over his shoulder as he does, as if he expects someone to burst out from a hedge with a binding spell as he does it. In this proximity, whatever is off is even more difficult to discern; his face is younger, but the weight on his shoulders is somehow older. Whatever he's done to himself, it's all internalized. When he looks back at Lucius, there's something weighted - maybe apologetic - in his gaze.

"You know me to be dead, don't you."