[D4, MA, Expecting] A Troublesome Question

[Kitsuki Hajime]

Hajime doesn't flinch. "There would have been political considerations, yes. Indeed, there are political considerations."

He tilted his head. "I think I can help you, Matsu-sama, but I can only do so through my idiom, the way I see the world. Do you suppose that would be useful to you? I warn you, it may seem a little impersonal, after all that you have felt and said."

[Matsu Ishioka]

The Lion looks up after a long sigh.

"Hai, Kitsuki-san. If you believe... If there is some potential to manage these feelings, I want to try. I..." He takes a steadying breath. "I do not want to burden Agasha-san with this," he says, determined.

[Kitsuki Hajime]

Hajime nodded. "I cannot promise that it will help you manage your feelings, but it can provide a basis for you to work on it, as you would work on anything else you wanted to improve about yourself."

He paused for a short time. "Your feelings are not the problem, Matsu-sama. What you have is an erroneous conclusion. You yourself have said this already, I am telling you nothing new. The knowledge of this lives in the mind, but has yet to reach the heart. What I propose to do is to walk you through the logic of it, so that you can see where limits can be placed and where your feelings and your mind can find harmony again."

"To begin with, ningen draw conclusions from our experiences. For example, when I first drink tea and it is too hot, I burn my mouth. I draw the conclusion that tea is hot when it is first prepared. I then develop a solution; I wait for tea to cool before I drink it. This has the added benefit of delaying gratification, and the tea tastes better."

"You had an experience, a traumatic experience, involving a Dragon samurai. You took the one experience of the Dragon clan and assigned the legitimate feelings of grief and anger that one Dragon samurai had earned to all Dragon samurai. Your solution was to mistrust and despise all Dragon samurai. To use the analogy from earlier, it would be as though I had drunk the tea when it was too hot and concluded that all tea is too hot and developed the solution to avoid it forever."

"Fortunately, you have now had a second and third experience with Dragon samurai, and these experiences have provided you with evidence that seems to conflict with your conclusion and thus invalidate the solution you predicated on it. You know that Agasha-sama is basically a kind person. I am brittle, but can be tolerated. In my training, we are not permitted to hold to a particular solution when new evidence comes into view. We must always re-evaluate our conclusions to be certain that they take all evidence into account. Only then can they be justified as truthful, or at the very least workable."

"So it comes time for you to re-evaluate your conclusion of some months ago. Your new experiences have generated evidence that is in conflict with it, and it cannot be supported as it is. The question now is, what elements of it are challenged by the new evidence, and what elements of it are unchallenged?"