"hum" or "pleased" for the wip guessing game?
"Sick," the kid says, his eyes gleaming as he just shy of literally pounces on the pile.
"Why does it speak like that?" Damian asks, looking suspicious.
"Please stop calling him 'it'," Jon repeats in exasperation. Damian shoots him an annoyed look.
"Oh, and 'him' is somehow more appropriate?" he asks dubiously.
"I–how is that even a question?!" Jon demands incredulously, staring back at him.
"Because it is twenty-one hours old and cannot possibly know its gender yet," Damian says. Jon . . . pauses.
". . . 'they', Nightwing," he says finally, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. At least he knows Damian's been doing his allyship research, he guesses. "If you don't know somebody's gender, it's 'they'."
"I'm cool with Nightwing calling me 'it', actually," the kid puts in conversationally as he shakes out–as they shake out a random T-shirt and make a face at it, apparently finding it . . . somehow offensive, Jon doesn't really know how. It's just a plain white T-shirt. "I don't know if I have a gender or whatever but I like that he thought about it. But if anybody in a lab coat ever calls me 'it' again, I'm disassembling them."
The staff all cringes.
That seems like weird phrasing, Jon thinks, trying not to frown. Like–"disassembling"? That's weird, right?
Then again, so is the kid.









