"Personally, I decided against taking any risky gambles and went with the sure option where I have a job offer and an apartment because I'm a very sensible person." He winks.

"You have a grey job offer?"

"Kinda tentatively. Emergency dispatch. Probably worth looking into if you think you can tolerate spending every summer fielding calls from people whose babies have quit breathing."

"- I can see why that might have openings, augh."

He laughs darkly.

"Well, I hope you have another plan if you can't do that one any more once you have kids."

"Oh, totally, I'm going to see about becoming a cop."

"- wow. Uh. Why."

"We can't all be smart enough to go purple. But more seriously? Because - they don’t necessarily know us. If there’s an incident with someone who was born orange, you can pretty much expect that everyone involved in responding to it any capacity has met an orange. They can be out of touch but there’s a limit, right?"

"- yes, but does that really... help?"

"Hm?"

"Like, if instead of oranges it were aliens, but not aliens they had any particular reason to think were bad, they'd probably be fine with the aliens."

"TV aliens who are just like us but their hair is black and they split up all the yellow jobs between purples and greens, sure - that's not the point. I think part of that is not knowing things? Half their particular reasons to think we're bad are stuff someone made up on the internet to shock people."

"And you're not going stealth?"

"Nah. They said on their website they’re open to hiring ex-reds." He shrugs and doesn't go into more detail because he wants to say they compared it to a program that obviously wasn't a real attempt to treat reds as part of the population they're supposed to protect, but it's only obvious because nothing is ever that, there wasn't another way to tell. But that's not what he wants to say to the cleans in earshot, to them he wants to say I would never betray their trust, at least if there were any chance he'd be believed, and he definitely doesn't want to say that without detailed caveats to someone who's probably going to lie to get a warehouse job.

"Are you going to tell, like - your neighbors, and whatnot - you're not married, right, I think there's only a handful of couples in this batch -"

"I'm going to stop dyeing my fucking hair red and be polite, and I get the impression talking about reds is not polite at all. I'm not planning to make anything up."

"Huh. What color does yours come in?"

"Grey. Yours?"

"Oh, wow, lucky you. I dye mine but just because I hate the awful magenta it comes in."

"I’ve never liked magenta either. Got a favorite shade of purple?"

"I'm going mullberry."

"Kind of a hard shade to find outfits to go with. I think. Or maybe that's just saying something about my taste in clothing."

"I'll be in work uniforms anyway. I can just wear neutrals off-hours, I'm not a clothes-horse, I'm the kind who'd just bleach things out of the heap into oblivion and wear those till they fell apart."

"I - haven't bothered but it'll be easier. I figure I'll start." It's the kind of "haven't bothered" where he wears whatever happens to be wearable and dyes his hair whatever shade is cheapest and has lovingly curated image collections of things he'd wear in every single other caste.