"I don't think there's anything wrong with being careful, but I think you shouldn't lose hope," Aiichiro says very quietly. He shifts slightly, obviously a little awkward about what he wants to say. The fact of the matter is that he's rarely entirely honest with this man, for a lot of reasons, and right now he wants to be.

He sounds very young when he speaks again, and this time it's not about kink. "Even if they have some bad purpose right now, or you can't trust them, or your superiors turn out to be wrong, it doesn't mean they can never change, or it's stupid to have given them a chance."

He pauses. "What if no one had given me a chance? I was really upset when I first came here, you know. Because where I come from, our ideas of what consent is are different from here, and I felt like mine was being compromised every day. I had to learn how to look at things the same way the city does, too. So someone like those people from the wastelands, I think giving up on them doesn't do any good, because they might still learn too."