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And there he was, wandering the jungle again, though it was a little different this time around. The left side of his face had a splint haphazardly bandaged on, though the whole swollen and bruised part of his face still throbbed in pain despite the tylenol Sabin had left him. Being beaten up so soon after a change had made the injury worse than if the bone and tissue had been around for longer.

It had taken him a little while to really consider what was making him so angry lately. One of the many alarms in his biological clock had gone off. He'd been feeling odd. "Horny" was perhaps the best way to put it. It was unusual for him to feel like this - he was a strong believer in building a relationship as opposed to one-night stands. If this driving instinct kept up, he didn't know what he was going to do. Plus, after seeing what his latest changes had done to him down there...

He put that out of his mind quickly.

There was even less distinction between what he wanted and what his animal sides wanted. He glanced at a tree, and its branches several feet above, and rather than fight off an unfamiliar urge, he welcomed it as though it was something he'd normally do. His sharp claws dug into the living wood, and in several prolonged but impressively fluid motions he'd clambered up to the safety of the low canopy.

Even without any special array of senses, he could hear something moving through the jungle below. His half-closed eyes opened wider to peer down for whatever was making the racket. First he re-realized that he was seven feet above the ground on a branch. The lizard part of him didn't understand what the fuss was about. There was no trick to lying on branches. But then again, lizards were used to being significantly smaller, lighter, and wingless.

The second thing he noticed was a very large lizard the color of a lemon. It took him a minute to realize that it was an islander - the person had no clothes on. He craned his neck down a little more, trying to get a sense of whether he could recognize them. They were entirely the wrong color, but those black bands on the tail would have let this person pass as Amaya.

He was unwilling to leave his branch just yet. It offered safety, something he'd seriously been lacking for a while. He threw out the name, hoping he didn't get things utterly wrong and that maybe the iguana girl had fallen into a vat of yellow paint the other day. "Amaya?"

He waved back a little, seeing her mouth move but unable to hear what she said both times. His tail curled around the branch, clinging desperately to it as he dug his claws into the tree trunk to get back down so that he could find out what she had to say. He immediately regretted having climbed up in the first place. Climbing up had been a chore, but getting down was a nightmare. His claws were losing their grip and sometimes slipping, carving shaky slash marks into the bark. He collapsed in a heap on top of one of the enormous roots of the tree, next to Amaya, the stress of leaving the branch having brought out a tic in one of his wings.

"Could you repeat that?" he asked sheepishly, smiling enough that his frill flared a bit. He looked her over. Simple facts came to mind. She was a girl. She was also a lizard. His struggling humanity was horrified at the connotations. He had to get his reptilian mind out of the gutter. Climbing branches was one thing... this was entirely different.

"Alec? Kid with the gray head, right?" He'd cured himself of his lisping, but with the way his tongue was shaped and moved, he had to hiss out his S's. The splint shifted a little as he moved his jaw. "I haven't ssseen him lately. Sssorry."

He tried to remember how old she was, but it was hard to guess without any telltale features to her. It mattered, of course, but only to the part of him that was human. His tail swished along the ground. He tried to make small talk - it would give him more time to look at her. A mixture of confusion and fascination was in his expression as he did. "Sssince when have you been, uh, yellow?"

"I've never seen a yellow iguana before. And actually... I do like it." He laughed, though it had a slight growl to it. The presence of a female lizard had knocked aside the deeply ingrained social taboos that were normally associated with the act of hitting on someone ten years younger than him. To the reptilian part of him, her age was meaningless. There were other things about her far more important. He looked her over again, smiling politely. The frill fanned out again, in response to her gaze.

He bobbed his head up and down once. Vaguely he percieved that 'Alec' was a threat to his courting display. He'd have to steer the conversation away from the guy, and what she was doing running around looking for him. He moved a little closer to Amaya, his tail making wide sweeps of the ground.

"Ssso, been doing anything interesssting lately?" he purred.

"I've been around," he murmured, bobbing twice in succession and opening his wings as well. Little nagging warnings itched at the edge of his mind. He shouldn't be doing this. She was just a teen. Underneath the scales she was human, and he was as well. But why then, the lizard seemed to inqure, was she returning his suggestive movements? The drive to procreate was seeping into all his instincts, blending a variety of showy tactics into his repertoire, including human ones. His smile widened to a nervous, hopeful grin, and he bobbed his head again.

His tail lashed at the ground, betraying his wild emotions. Everything human within him screamed at him to get away from her immediately, but he couldn't now. Not when he'd already caught her interest. "Are you... doing anything right now?"

Patience ran thin. There was a very short span of time in which he was entirely not himself, the drive too strong to mentally threaten away. The next thing his floundering consciousness knew he was gently nuzzling her yellow-scaled face with the uninjured right side of his.

Words had suddenly become unnecessary. In a human movement he wrapped his arms around her shoulders, and drew his head back from against hers to look at her, his animal side seeing a mate who'd been won over by his courtship display. The strong sexual urges were relaxed for just long enough that clarity could briefly shine through, and Amaya was Amaya and not just a yellow lizard.

No.

No, no, no.

He drew back suddenly, his arms slipping away from her scaly body. His mouth hung open slightly in dismay at what he'd been about to do to her. The frill was displayed defensively. A sickened feeling clawed at his insides. She was a human being! What was wrong with him?

"Oh my god. Amaya," he mumbled with wide eyes, taking a step back from her. "I... I didn't mean to... to..."

"I... I don't know..." Zach searched for words, finding nothing that made an awful lot of sense. He, at least, had really been out for exactly what she could guess, and didn't seem to have enough humanity left to stop himself. She looked so desperate, so upset, but he didn't dare get that close to her again. Next time he might not snap out of it, or he'd lose it again. The chance wasn't worth taking. Most of him was still hopelessly lusting after her. He put both his hands on his head, looking like he expected to claw the instincts right out of himself.