To make matters worse, Viltez actually [i]catches[/i] him instead of jumping out of the way, and by the time Autharyx is sitting up his cheeks are stubbornly colouring pink even as his lips are drawn together in a tight line. Viltez starts laughing the moment he catches his expression, and even through the embarrassment Autharyx has to concede that he prefers that over the way the half-breed had flinched away from him earlier. His tail even sneaks around his arm, leaving the dragon unable to pull away in case he might spook his host again. At least, that's the reason he gives himself to explain why he's not immediately getting up again. At the half-breed's words, he even finds himself breaking into a small but genuine smile of his own.

"Yeah, me too," he says, sounding a bit surprised at the admission himself. "I've never really spent time with..." humans? "... other people." Of course he had always enjoyed himself well enough, not that 'fun' was a concept he was particularly acquainted with. Somehow the time he spent twisting in and out of thunderstorms wasn't quite comparable to the time he spent with Viltez. It wasn't better or worse per se, just... new. He hadn't thought there was a lot of new things for him to discover, but it turned out there was more to being human than he'd initially imagined. 

He smiles at Viltez again, surprised to find the embarrassment he felt earlier had simply drained away.Perhaps this is something he can get used to. He can feel the forest around him clearer that he'd bothered to in perhaps decades, and he can feel Viltex as a warm presence against him. Did he ever feel so,,, alive in his real form? Maybe in the beginning when everything had been new to him, but the world had changed so much since then. This whole exercise in mortality had been a bit of a whim from the beginning, but it seemed to be turning out pretty well.