Paul has long thought one of the mercies of dying is that the dead so rarely have to reckon with the things they leave behind, their fragile mortal shells and the brute labour of burial and grief.

When he sees Midoriya fall to his knees to staunch a hole in a dead and lying thing, Paul has an answer to a question he never wanted to ask, an answer that he didn't need. (He's always been able to imagine it; he's always been sorry, and never known how to say it.)

Midoriya screams. Paul doesn't. He needs his breath to propel him across the beach and to drive the terrible efficiency of his knives, carving open a path to the stricken Hero through the rotten dead and screaming shades.

(He isn't fighting alone. He doesn't look at the dead man on his left. They still work in perfect synchronicity, the rust of lost time scraped away so much faster than Paul thinks he can bear.

He bears it anyway.)

Paul puts a knife through the side of his double's head and twists at it like he's dislodging any other kind of sucking parasite, bracing his foot against the fusing lips of the mass enclosing Midoriya. A larger hand snakes around his side and seizes the doppelganger by the hair, levering it back, and Paul tells himself he doesn't feel the closeness of the cold at his back.