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Zach was quite happy with how things were going. Despite it supposedly being sometime in winter, the sunlight was warm and everything seemed calm almost to the point of being surreal. Not that he minded. He still had difficulty in his walking, but that was only if he tried to run. There was no such thing as a comfortable position flat on his feet or walking on his long toes, or at least he had yet to find one. Shirts were still out of the question, so his white scarf and pants were the best he could do. He'd woken up fairly early, and spent a while just looking down at the village from the top of his duplex stairs with his wings spread wide to stretch them. There were few places he could spread them to their full 12 feet, though it felt great to. Deep down he did wonder whether they were enough to get him off the ground, but he doubted it.

Accompanied by a soft jangling of metal at his side, he maneuvered down the steps of his upstairs duplex and briskly across the smooth dirt in front of the building. Just his luck, the place was deserted at this time of day. Well, except for one lone wheelchair-bound figure heading in the opposite direction. Zach turned his head, curious to at least see who it was.

The scales that plated his face over prevented any exaggerated expression from him, so all that Alec received was a sort of blank stare with a downward curl at the ends of his mouth. Though it had been no real fault of the teen, Alec had gotten Zach thrown out of the village right about the time when Annie was first on the loose. Not to mention those sharp teeth gave him a few bleeding bites on his shoulder at the time. What had become of him now? He couldn't increase his pace any more but he was faster than the wheelchair and caught up. Being a good eight feet tall, it felt weird towering and he tried to bend his neck down as far as it could comfortably go. He wasn't sure what to say, so a greeting would have to suffice for now.

"Hey."

Zach took a step backward, toes grabbing at the ground in a way all too reminiscent of hands. The noise Alec made surprised him, sending his frill half-fanned. It gave him an opportunity to get a better look at the teen and how warped he'd become. But better, better than just being a human. Though... it couldn't be... was that bark and leaves? Probably a story not worth inquiring about.

He stared back at Alec and his wheelchair, wondering what he could possibly be thinking. Admittedly, Zach couldn't help but stare every time he walked past a mirror. It was unreal to think that the monstrous red lizard that regarded him in the reflection each time was really him. And though during all the time not spent in front of the mirror he got to avoid the confusing problem of recognizing the crocodile-like face as his own, he could still see the shining red scales all over the rest of him and move limbs that shouldn't exist. He'd lost an arm once, what felt like so long ago, but now the scales were interlocked in such a way that he'd never be able to prove it. Entirely whole, physically, and perhaps even more so with the wings and tail. He'd been erased as neatly as his past had. It was just too hard to see this draconic form as anything other than some entirely different 'person', and as such he had to be as well. Of course he knew that the creature in the mirror was himself; he wasn't stupid. But to make the connection between the reality of things and who he was had grown very difficult. No matter how many times he thought it, there was just no way to quickly and skillfully grasp the idea that he'd changed completely. Far safer to make a leap of faith that he was someone else now, and leave coming to terms with his past actions behind him. Very far behind him, preferably.

"Hey, I'm not crazy. The people who want to get off this island are," he grinned, oddly defensive. Because he wasn't crazy. This was the life he wanted, and he was grateful he'd gotten back everything he'd lost in his twisted human life and more. Maybe it was because the teen had once attacked him, but it was just unnerving to be stared at like that with such a predatory gaze. It stirred in him the self-preservation that had only grown over the course of his stay on the island. That slack-jawed stare and those teeth and constantly shifting eyes... And no one seemed to be anything but terrified of Zach's new, better form as a dragon, and it was almost disappointing. And with that primal part of him quite indistinguishable from the remains of his rational human self, getting defensive seemed a perfectly good course of action. Not that he thought about it too hard. Thinking before he acted was a waste of time.

The frill remained in its somewhat open position, intricately linked to just how much Zach clenched his jaw. Practice made perfect, and though the frill was now larger than ever his experience made it easy to move it without having to think about it. There was a sharp pain from the action, but his very bones had been aching since his last change. Even the small dose of painkillers he forced down daily just covered up the residual pain rather than cure it. Zach regarded the shark's grin as some sort of hostile baring of teeth at first, but his initial suspicions seemed to be proven false by the laugh. Was it just a grin after all? He relaxed a little.

The kid was in a wheelchair, he remembered. It was unlikely that even with ill intentions could he do much of anything. Zach wasn't sure what to say about the boy's obviously disabled state. It conflicted with his current view of how things were supposed to go. Everyone's changes were supposed to better them (like how his own changes had bettered himself), but this was just... cruel. True, the boy had made a huge mistake in trying to kill Aubrey, but the changes weren't supposed to be a punishment. Luckily, it wasn't long before he created for himself an explanation to suit his interests. This, he reasoned as he glanced at a couple of leaves, must have been a serum of Dr. Moreau's doing. Zach knew little about the man beyond a death threat, being cast out of his duplex for a lengthy time, and of course the many accounts of his madness from islanders he'd met long ago. No wonder Alec had such a sorry fate. A horrible fate, but one he was safely exempt from sharing by way of extreme fortune that Sabin had chosen him to become his dragon. Selfish as it was, he felt even better about himself.

"Great!" he exclaimed, his voice seeming to have a permanently raspy quality to it, as though his throat had never fully recovered from its sudden jolt in length. And he certainly felt great, barring the little incident with Gaius, of course. But Zach had learned from his mistakes then and Sabin hadn't held it against him. Almost protectively, Zach twined a couple of large fingers around the medicine bag at his side. He hadn't caught on to the teen's discomfort, being far too confident in his views on the ways of the island to realize his comment was insulting. It had been his assumption that Alec knew full well that what he'd done was, well, completely and utterly wrong. Unaware, he continued on his tangent of praise for the labs. "And yes, big changes. I'm done with those, finally. And they've helped me so much. I feel like a different person. It's just great. I owe Dr. Duvert three times over now."

"But what about you? You're looking, uh... different." It was hard to give a compliment to the teen's strange features. If he hadn't met Anjali he wouldn't have believed those were real leaves that poked out of Alec's patches of bark-like skin. He was careful to keep his jaw movements to a minimum. What had happened to him around Sid had been unfortunate and he didn't want a repeat of that disturbing jaw popping.

"Hey, changes can be rough. But I'm glad to see you're moving on. No sense getting stuck on the past." He shifted on his feet. At this rate that was going to become his personal mantra. He thought he'd caught a hint of bitterness from the teen, but he wasn't sure. With his neck still curved in an arc, he let his gaze quickly travel down to where the boy's mockery of feet were. A pair of pathetically small flippers, and more of that bark-like skin farther above them. So it seemed walking was impossible for Alec, but that wasn't what a shark was built for. "Have you... tried some swimming out in the lake?"

The drawn-out statement that Alec ended with caught his attention. He honestly had no idea what the teen meant. For Zach, things had been fine, wonderful even, for the most part. Even the fact that his last change had been painful enough to warrant being blocked out of his memory didn't put a damper on things. For the time being, he felt safe, safe from not only physical hurts but mental anguish as well. He gave Alec a quizzical look. "Off?"

"You'll never know until you try." Encouragement was what this guy needed. He needed to feel that this was better than his life before, even if perhaps thanks to Moreau it wasn't quite. There were some visible slits on Alec's neck. They were undeniably gills. Probably functioning ones, too, though only Alec would know for sure.

"Wait, Amaya's sick?" He couldn't stop his thoughts from flickering briefly to the graveyard and several of its more unsavory inscriptions, the ones denoting the deaths of islanders. His tail, which had been lazily swishing, stopped. She'd finished changing though. It couldn't be from those. Maybe it was just a jungle sickness. Curable. Yeah, that was it. Or perhaps it had to do with how bloated she'd looked before. Or the time she'd turned bright yellow. He was afraid to think too hard on that explanation, seeing as they'd both been a little strange then. "Is she better now? Y'know, I saw her turn yellow once... did she... change color again?"

He followed the story, worried enough that now two of his few 'friends' on the island were sick. Sid, and now Amaya. Just his luck, and theirs. The shark-boy seemed so torn up about it. It wasn't like anyone could have guessed she was sick except the doctors, and they apparently managed to figure that out and take her away to be treated. There wasn't really a way to say it though. Zach had full, unwavering trust in the labs. Those few graves he'd seen had been flukes, unimportant. If Amaya was in the labs she'd come out fine.

But the last remark floored him. He let out a wheeze and looked away from Alec, gaze unfocused. Had he - out in the jungle - they couldn't have - that just wasn't possible! "Pregnant!?"

"Eggs?" he repeated blankly. Though it was at this point nothing new, Zach had heard what happened to Billy after an incident with Colche. For a moment he was relieved by the realization that no one had done anything along those lines to him. Surely they wouldn't let something like this happen, or go without some form of retribution. His mind raced. It had been an accident. They'd both gone a little weird but nothing had happened. He could have sworn they'd done nothing more than an awkward hug, but he didn't have a crystal-clear recollection of the incident. And what of the cameras? Had they been too deep in the jungle to be seen? Sabin had said something about that once, something about dense foliage... "What, she... she laid eggs... in the cafeteria?"

It seemed like an appropriate time to fall back on his 'rebirth' mentality and did so. Even if... Amaya's pregnancy was partly his fault somehow (who knew how long half-lizard eggs took to gestate?), it was the fault of his imperfect human self and not the fantastic creature he was now. He'd long since abandoned most every memory from before the island and even a few from early on there as some sort of vessel of faults and mistakes. He'd been a weak and misguided creature prior to being recreated as a dragon, prone to making stupid mistakes and believing in fanciful lies. Not any more, though. He was above such things. What he believed now about anything was completely, utterly true, and no one would convince him otherwise.

But even if it had been his previous self, that was still him in some sense, and others wouldn't see the difference like he did. It sounded like Alec was accusing him, and he didn't know if denying it would do any good. Just because he didn't remember it happened didn't mean it couldn't have. After all... Aubrey had nearly been murdered once by him and he didn't remember a thing about that. All he knew was that a couple months just wasn't a rational amount of time for someone to carry eggs, and it was this single hope that he used to rid himself of blame. He was still dodging the beady-eyed stare the shark was giving him. Some moments went by before Zach choked out a response, one that wasn't particularly strong. "Ah. So would I. So would I."