Paul should be glad that Midoriya doesn't question him. He is, for the most part. There's further relief in being understood, in having his commitment recognized.

But it's like his friend says. He hopes these precautions won't be necessary, but as he glances up from the unintelligible swirl of tea leaves at the bottom of his half-empty cup he cannot help but feel they will be. He smiles back, crooked and mild, with too much knowing held between them.

If it's not whatever Midoriya fears now, it will be something else. The world outside this house churns on, a blood-soaked engine winding down towards devastation and taking them all with it regardless of what they might want, or the promises they make to each other.

"So do I," he says, with the palest trace of wryness, "But that's what precautions are for. Thank you for trusting me to be one of them. May you never have to ask."

(He wonders if this is what Gurney and Duncan and Thufir felt like, sometimes. He wonders how much he ever understood of the way his teachers would talk to each other, or the vows they made to him, or how fragile they understood them to be in ways that he did not.)