The gesture is unexpected and Adora is unfamiliar, so Setsuna briefly stiffens, unsettled; she isn't prepared to be comforted, under the circumstances, and doesn't know how to react, if it's okay to react. There's a lot of memories telling her comfort is unwantable intruding on a life of hard-won acceptance that it very much is. But as painful as the eight of her own history is, her body is a warehouse of instinctive refusal of all those lessons, regardless, and she leans into the half-embrace with relief anyway, letting the anxious tension out with a long sigh. Adora isn't someone she trusts with a gesture like this, not yet, but ... it feels good to be hugged like this, anyway. She needed it.

"It's hard not to, when you don't know what to think," Setsuna says, still pale but slightly mollified. She smiles sidelong at Adora, and says more or less what she's already thinking aloud outright for once. "Uhm, thanks. For being nice. I needed it." Her smile grows wider, genuine and bright. "I think I was starting to forget what it felt like to have someone really be nice to me for a minute there."