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"Does your gender presentation match your body's assigned sex at birth?" Alhaitham asks out of the blue one day while he, Hatguy, and Nahida have just finished setting up their camp during a corruption investigation (and brief vacation) in the Hypostyle.
Hatguy blinks several times. "What?"
"Are you cisgender?" the scribe tries again.
"No, I meant what are you asking me about that for? That's bizarre, even for you," Hatguy clarifies.
Alhaitham shrugs and takes a sizeable stack of books from his Vision subspace, apparently accepting that this line of questioning is going nowhere fast. "You might want to read these in detail, but it's in your best interest to at least skim the parts relevant to you. See ya."
He doesn't wait for a reply before heading off to his tent. Hatguy flips him off, mostly out of habit; he's not exactly a fan of drawn-out small talk either, to put it mildly.
"What reading material did he want to recommend?" Nahida asks, inching closer.
"Couldn't you find that out from him?" Hatguy mimes the gesture she uses to fetch thoughts with her Seeds of Skanda. As they're two of the three people in the country (or maybe just two, depending where the Traveller's gotten to lately) who can see it, he often teases her about the childish smiley faces that mark out her telepathy.
"You know I don't use that on my friends unless there's a really good reason," she says, pouting a little. "Maybe it's material for an interesting corollary to your paper on Yashiori Island's trade infrastructure pre- and post-Ishine Collapse? Out of your topics, that seems like the one he'd be most likely to have thoughts and recommendations on, though of course he does read quite widely and he's creative enough as a scholar that I wouldn't be surprised if it were on, for example, one of your Inazuman mining infrastructure and regulation papers instead... Hatguy? Hatguy, are you all right?"
Hatguy has no words as he motions to the open book from the top of the stack. The little Archon reads... and then starts giggling, which soon turns into bright peals of unrestrained laughter.
Honestly, fair enough, but Hatguy's too busy being absolutely mortified by the fact that he's just been given a sizeable pile of books on puberty - ranging from simple primers for human children to specific and advanced medical texts on hormones and anatomy.
(Did Alhaitham really read all of this stuff? He's too judgemental to recommend books he hasn't read and given his approval, but...
Why would he do that, when it has nothing to do with his research or his usual interests? It can't have been just for this.
Can it?
No, no, that'd have to mean that, for some reason, the notoriously standoffish Scribe Alhaitham took it upon himself to review materials advising Hatguy about puberty because he... what? Cares about him? The notion is barely any less egomaniacally insane than the shit Hatguy vaguely remembers saying as the self-dubbed Everlasting Lord of Arcane Wisdom.)
By the time Hatguy's finished with his mini crisis, Nahida still hasn't quite stopped snickering - so, like the younger sibling he will grudgingly admit he is, he promptly punches her shoulder.
...very lightly, so he doesn't break any of her tiny bones.
<<>>
When the two immortals get back home to the Sanctuary of Surasthana, Hatguy does, in fact, have to contend with a deeply annoying quirk of his body - not a puberty-related one but rather the fact that a couple of his artificial joints got exposed while they were fighting a herd of Pyro Fungi and he's consequently been carrying around half his body weight in fucking sand.
(Which is a lot, especially considering that his bones are literally made of metal and he's full of weird Archon-stuff.)
A little vindictively, he uses one of the thinner books Alhaitham gave him to wedge open his elbow so that he can pour out some of the sand; Nahida stares at him, wide-eyed and faintly horrified.
"At least get a towel," she grouses, shaping a basket out of Dendro energy to catch the debris.
"Yeah, yeah," he grumbles right back, sweeping the sand on the floor out the door with a breeze.
She smiles. "I heard the first 'yeah' just fine."
He sticks his tongue out at her, because that joke has never actually been funny but it's even less so given that she tries some form of it several times a week. That elicits an outright laugh from Nahida, and he playfully summons up a gust to shove at her; she pushes back with a little flowering vine, and soon enough the two are chasing each other around their shared home and laughing until they're all out of the restless energy that might otherwise keep them from a peaceful sleep.
At that time, neither one of them has any idea of the pattern whose start the book incident heralds...
<<>>
That bleeding heart Kshahrewar dumbass from the Inter-Darshan Championship is the first adult who tries to give Hatguy what he'll later learn is euphemistically called The Talk. The two of them happen to be in the House of Daena at the same time one day - not exactly a rare circumstance, though not necessarily a common one either - and Hatguy is off by a little-used shelf mostly containing books on pre-Cataclysm historiography when the claymore-wielder and his chirping attaché case approach him.
"Lost?" he snipes, because what use does an architect have for monographs on late Dahri trade records or comparative accounts of the post-Deshret succession/organization crisis or anything else in this corner?
"What? Of course not - I've known my way around here since before you were born," Kaveh replies with a faux-haughty huff.
"Yeah, sure, old man." Hatguy rolls his eyes, snickering at the idea of Kaveh having been around since before he was "born". Immortality would so not suit him.
(Wait, also, isn't the architect in his late twenties? If he entered the Akademiya and started coming to the House of Daena at around fifteen or a bit older like most students, he's got either an incredibly good sense of direction or a weirdly low estimate of Hatguy's age.)
"Anyway!" Kaveh's voice comes out awkward and shrill, and Hatguy has a sudden appreciation for just why the man's roommate always has those noise-cancelling headphones on. "There's something I think you need to have explained to you, and it certainly won't be covered in your classes, so I've decided to help you out."
"There are a lot of things that aren't covered in my classes," Hatguy says flatly. "Specifically, everything in the world except for the things that are. What kind of scholar are you if you don't even know that, Mr. Light of Kshahrewar?"
Kaveh reddens slightly, but instead of getting distracted again, he soldiers on: "You're getting to be about the age in a young boy's life where his father has to give him some guidance, and... well... I know what it's like not to have that. A neighbour taught me about these things when I was about your age, so I've decided to - er, to pay it forward, you could say."
Well, darn. Is he actually sniffling ? Flying away at this point would clearly make a mess in more ways than one, and Hatguy doesn't want to have to deal with that conversation (whether it's with Nahida or with Cyno), so he just sets about picking up the books he came here for in the first place and starts looking through one of them.
This does not deter Kaveh.
Much as he tries, Hatguy can't actively make himself get tunnel vision for his reading, so he's unable to filter out the lecture that the Dendro allogene launches into about the changes that are normal and natural for kids his supposed age, from the physical to the psychological to a frankly bizarre level of emphasis on different kinds of romantic interest that a human teen might begin to develop. The damned briefcase even projects visual aids! All told, it's a strong contender for the title of Worst Hour of Hatguy's Life.
(...okay, no, it isn't even in the running by a long shot, but he still winds up a strange combination of mortified and frustrated by the time he gets away.)
<<>>
"Your roommate is the worst," Hatguy informs Alhaitham that evening when he's dropping off some paperwork for Nahida's review.
"In what way?" asks the scribe.
Hatguy snorts, thinking back to the myriad complaints and arguments he's overheard or seen on message boards between the two. Of course he needs to elaborate - and since he's been asked, he might as well take the opportunity to share a little of the exact nature of the architect's idiocy.
"Well, let's see - first of all, he seems to think I'm about twelve," starts the Anemo allogene, with a sneer. "And today, because he seems to think I'm about twelve, he cornered me in the library and spent an entire hour going on and on about all the oh-so-scary new things that are 'perfectly normal and natural for a kid my age'. He might not be an Amurta scholar, but he damn well tried to go over every bit of the biological systems involved in growing up, and then some!"
"Which is more than a little pointless, given that you're an immortal automaton," the man agrees.
"Wha— you know ?!" Hatguy demands. And then after a second he remembers: "So what were all those books for?"
"A warning, mostly," says Alhaitham. "I've heard people at Lambad's talking about their concerns for 'that little Vahumana boy with the hat, who's always all alone'."
Oh. That's... Ugh, that makes only too much sense. Far be it from Alhaitham to have a conversation when he can accomplish the same thing via books. (If only more humans thought the same, honestly.)
"Also, I thought it best to point you towards reliable sources in case my conclusion was wrong," the Dendro allogene admits a moment later, bicoloured eyes flitting to the side almost sheepishly. Hatguy nearly freezes, because he's seen that expression before. On Nahida. When she's admitting to one of her attempts to surreptitiously do what she calls "big sister things".
Unbidden, Hatguy starts thinking back on all the little interactions he can remember having with Alhaitham these past months - and comparing them to the way Nahida treats him, despite the vast differences between the two with regards to personality and demeanour (and, of course, height), leads him to a pretty clear inference.
He's four hundred and ninety-eight years old . How the hell is he suddenly collecting big siblings?
...eh, he might as well own it.
"Gee, thanks, Abeih," he says, putting on a perfect mirror of Makoto's angelic smile for a moment... and then punching the scribe on his shoulder before flying away with a laugh and a raspberry.
He doesn't see the uncertain look on Alhaitham's face at the honorific, nor the way it soon settles into something contented.
<<>>
Surprisingly, it's that Cryo allogene girl from Rtawahist - Layla, he remembers; one of the Traveller's many, many friends - who brings the topic up next, and at a distinctly odd hour. Not that there's a time of day that'd improve the experience, of course, but it being two in the morning is especially outlandish. They're in one of the upper pathways of Razan Garden, Hatguy to check a wide perimeter around his dwelling from force of habit before he goes to bed and Layla for who knows what, and with a soft smile, she waves at him and sprints over. He considers just leaving before she can reach him, but curiosity keeps him in place long enough for her to close the distance.
"Hatguy! Hi!" As with her steps and posture, there's a certain bounce to her voice that he distinctly remembers not being there when he ran into her in the Inter-Darshan Championship.
"Layla, right?" he asks flatly.
It takes her a split-split second to answer - a pause that wouldn't be noticeable to most humans. "Yep, that's me! So, Hatguy - can I call you Hatguy?"
"Well, yeah. That is my legal name," says Hatguy, who bribed Paimon with sunsettia candy to get her to change it for him.
(Unfortunately, she insisted that she couldn't put the space in for some reason, hence Hatguy's name being stuck together as one word.)
"Huh. I get why you don't seem to live with your parents, then..." Layla shakes her head. "Which brings us right to what I wanted to talk to you about, actually."
Oh no.
Oh, no.
This had better not be going where he thinks it's fucking going.
But of course, maybe because he has the worst luck in Teyvat or maybe because his long life experience and recent studies have honed his pattern recognition into something diamond-sharp, Layla's train of thought does turn out to be going in exactly that direction: namely, the direction of giving him a completely unnecessary spiel about the perils of human adolescence. She focuses a lot on the importance of rest, which is pretty damn funny coming from someone he ran into in the garden at an hour when almost any sensible person would be asleep; she also gives him a deeply disturbing warning about observing the chain of custody on any drink he buys around strangers, and the best routes in the city to ensure that shadows from behind him almost always fall in his line of sight. (The latter is, admittedly, going to save him some time compared to finishing mapping it out himself, but he doesn't want to know why she thinks it's an essential part of the "growing up" talk.)
After what feels like eternity but is probably only about fifteen minutes, she relents, turning to ask for questions; he, of course, has none.
Well. Maybe one 'question', in a sense: "We're never going to speak of this again, got it?"
<<>>
Thankfully, Layla seems to have no objections to the idea of never speaking of that whole interaction again; he passes her on the way to a lecture the next morning and she doesn't even so much as try to greet him.
(Which is a trait he generally appreciates in people, anyway, so if Nahida asks again, he guesses he can technically say he's made a friend, kind of.)
<<>>
By the time Madam Faruzan comes to find Hatguy on his favourite branch, he can't really say he's shocked. He is, however, deeply annoyed and thoroughly confounded about where the fuck these humans keep getting the idea that it's any of their fucking business even if he did need to be taught this stuff (which, of course, he decidedly does not). Sure, he might look young and not have a "parent" or "guardian", but there are so many adults in Sumeru City. Why are all these people acting like they individually need to look out for him instead of experiencing the cognitive bias towards diffusion of responsibility or whatever?
But hey, at least Faruzan's always entertaining with her exaggerated old-lady affectations - and to her credit, she actually believes him and stops as soon as he protests that it's unnecessary. Magnanimously, he agrees to help her collect henna berries faster since they're both going to the Khaj-Nisut domain on the weekend anyway.
"She did it to Collei last week, too," Cyno says, nodding gravely, when Hatguy answers his question about what the other Anemo allogene was doing up there with him. "Of course, it was completely unnecessary given that Tighnari includes thorough and age-appropriate lessons on medicine in her curriculum, but on some level it's the thought that counts. Maybe this was Faruzan's way of encouraging you to branch out? She'd probably have listened if you told her to leaf you alone sooner."
Hatguy frowns for a long moment.
"The joke is that you were on a tree branch, and the idiom 'branching out' means exploring a topic outside your usual interests," Cyno explains. "Which the topic of human development would be, since your major field of study is social history, if I'm not mistaken."
Hatguy shows his excellent powers of self-control by only grumbling a little bit.
"As for 'leaf you alone', that's because tree branches have many leaves," Cyno adds, probably trying to be helpful.
Hatguy gives him a flat look. "Yeah, no, I got it. That was just sad, even by your standards."
"Sad? And here I thought jokes were inherently cheerful," Cyno retorts. He's smirking, though, so he definitely knows full well what Hatguy meant and is revelling in his misery; Hatguy makes a mental note to throw an extra wind blade or five at the Electro allogene the next time they spar.
<<>>
The next week, when Collei accompanies Tighnari into the city on a shopping trip, Hatguy buys her several pieces of sunsettia candy. Not because they're friends or anything - just as a gesture of commiseration over their now very slightly expanded list of shared traumas.
<<>>
The pace of the encounters seems to pick up from there, to the point that there's an occasion where Hatguy has to tactfully (by his standards) flee from four different renditions of The Talk in the space of a single afternoon outing - one from Rima of the Corps of Thirty, one from Pam at the fish market, one from Qishan when he's picking up takeout at Lambad's, and then another from Kimiya on his way past the alchemy bench. Effendi even tries to work it into a conversation about a bounty later that week, to unintentionally hilarious effect given that the target is a Ruin Drake. (Hatguy pointedly refuses to explain why he's laughing.)
The halls of the Akademiya are largely an escape from this particular brand of nonsense, given that everyone's too busy worrying about their own classes and research projects to bother him when he's there, but he has other things to do and other places to be - and besides, he's not about to change his day to day plans just because of these humans and their clownish tendency to poke around at matters that have absolutely nothing to do with any of them. He might not have Nahida's frankly excessive patience and forbearance, but he can deal with a few nosy idiots.
"Hatguy? Hatguy, wait a minute!"
Fuck. That's Tirzad. Hatguy decides he's not dealing with this particular nosy idiot, whether it's for The Talk or for a talk about historiography. If Nahida pouts at him later for flying in the halls, he can challenge her to see how she likes talking to that shrill dumbass.
<<>>
The next time he's at the Grand Bazaar picking up his and Nahida's favourite spiced tea blend, Nilou starts speedwalking towards him with the exact same purposeful expression that human adults always seem to get right before trying to teach him an unnecessary lesson about human anatomy and development, and he decides he's not risking another one getting started. He almost kind of likes Nilou, after all, so it'd be a shame to just stand there and let her ruin that.
"No, I don't need advice about 'growing up'," he says preemptively, rolling his eyes.
"Oh. Okay," she replies, sounding more than a little confused. "Hello to you, too, Hatguy! Could you... maybe bring Lord Kusanali some of the Padisarah Pudding I made?"
Well, at least that was easy. "Sure, whatever."
He follows her to the backstage area's Hydro-Cryo gadget, where portions of the pudding are tucked between pots of what looks like it might be in-progress special effects supplies of some kind. (He recognizes some of the scents from the workshop of that little pyromaniac who he's run into a few times around the Serenitea Pot.) It seems like a questionable storage decision, but hey, if it hasn't blown up in their faces yet - and isn't blowing up in his face right now - it makes no difference to him.
"If you ever need a listening ear, you're always welcome at the theatre!" Nilou calls after him as he leaves, her sentiment echoed by a chorus of other Zubayr Theatre staff and community members.
Hah. As if he'd need that - what a silly mortal she is, as usual.
(Deep, deep, deep down, he can't help but recognize that it's sweet of them to offer.)
<<>>
Hatguy draws the line when Naphis - fucking Amurta Sage Naphis, someone he's spoken with all of twice! - approaches him at the Puspa Café to oh-so-gently ask whether anyone's spoken to him about the changes he can expect over the next few years as he "grows up". The old man doesn't even let him answer, and gets a solid thirty seconds into a sentimental soliloquy full of analogies about youth and saplings and tree bark for some reason when Hatguy decides that he's really had enough of this shit .
"Geez, don't you have anything better to do?! I'm not going to change over the next few years at all, since I'm an immortal puppet with an artificial body," he snaps, scowling.
"Oh," says the sage. Whispers rapidly begin to fill the café, and Hatguy realizes abruptly that he just shouted that in a very public place...
"Is that all?" he asks, resolutely pressing down the feeling of something like worry at the idea of his nature being known to everyone. What's that legal saying he encountered a while ago - you can't un-ring a bell? Worrying about what they heard certainly won't make everyone in the room un-hear it, so there's no point. Besides, he's stronger than nearly anyone or anything else in the country! What does he even have to worry for?
Still, he lives in the same institution that produced Dottore; who's to say that there won't be another researcher similarly eager to explore the characteristics and limits of his mechanical body, ethics be damned? (Who's to say the next one won't get lucky at his expense?) Beyond that, artificial life is taboo in Sumeru, forbidden by one of the foundational laws of the Akademiya - and sure, he's more human-like than the Ruin Creatures that law is actually aimed at, but does that mean he's exempt? Will Nahida be pressured into casting him out, now that the information is public? People talk, after all, and people are - by and large - idiots...
He returns to the Sanctuary of Surasthana almost in a daze, keeping his face and voice carefully flat so as not to let on to Nahida about his worries - but of course, being Nahida, she seems to catch something in his voice or mannerisms anyway.
Although she's not yet finished with her meeting, the person she's meeting with happens to be Alhaitham, who nods before she's even fully turned back to him. Both of them get up, crossing the room in a matter of seconds - and then the tiny Archon is using a Dendro construct to hoist herself up into a hug, her touch petal-soft and warm around his shoulders.
The scribe pats the two immortals on their heads - neatly, a little stiffly, and exactly twice each. Hatguy huffs out a small laugh at the awkward motion, silently swearing never ever to tell anyone how comforting he actually finds it.
...and if, by the end of the following week, he cries from sheer overflowing joy as he realizes that his outburst changes nothing about how people in Sumeru City treat him (other than an intern from Bimarstan coming by the next day to ask whether he knows of any special medical needs he might have), well, that's his business and no one else's, got it?