With all the madness of the last few days, Julius just needed a bit of...time. Space. Something? It was hard to explain what he was feeling right now. There was just a lot of stuff he hadn't properly dealt with - like his mother's threat hanging over him or, right, being sealed - and it had all kind of snuck up on him.

Normally, when he felt like this, he would take off into the sky and fly for a few hours. It was like he left his problems down below when he went up into the air, and he got to watch them grow smaller and smaller as he spiraled up.

He couldn't do that now, obviously, but the sky was still there, wasn't it? Maybe just going out and staring at it would help.

He made his way up to the roof, and crossed over to the edge to watch the sunset, hands shoved in his pockets, wind ruffling his hair. It wasn't the same as the wind pulling at his feathers mid-flight, but when he closed his eyes he could almost pretend--

Eventually, when the sun was almost gone, he finally opened them again, turning back towards the roof proper to explore - was there really a garden up here? - when suddenly he spotted-- "Nina!"

Cat socializing was not to be underrated.

"I didn't, uhh, see you there," he admitted, his grasp on the obvious a sight to behold. "Umm. There long?"

Granted, she had no idea what he'd been doing, other than brooding which somehow felt just and right on this roof, but he still felt like he'd been caught doing something draconic.

No one must ever know his secret, Nina! His terribly important secret that exactly zero people on the island cared about!

But Nina looked relaxed and incurious - which one day, would probably be a dead giveaway - and hey, there was a book nearby, and Julius felt his shoulders unclenching, even as he heard his mother's voice complaining about what a terrible dragon he was for letting a human sneak up on him. He pushed that away and offered her a smile. "Yeah," he admitted. "I had to come up and look at the sky for a bit. In New Mexico, sometimes it feels like all there is is sky."

"Oh, uh, sure," Julius said, coming to sit with her.

It wasn't the brooding quality thinking time he'd come up here for, but, honestly, just having someone to talk to who was neither fawningly servile or dismissively contemptuous was a new enough sensation that it banished those troubling feelings anyway. Here, he was nice to people and they were nice back!

It was an amazing feeling and not just because it was so new.

"I'm not disturbing you?" he checked, even as he settled down on the blanket.

"Can't really argue with sunset," Julius said, offering her a tentative smile in return for the enthusiastic welcome. "You're sewing and reading at the same time? Wow. I bet that takes skill."