We study the defect (or 'signed area') distribution of standard toral Laplace eigenfunctions restricted to shrinking balls of radius above the Planck scale, either for deterministic eigenfunctions averaged w.r.t. the spatial variable, or in a random Gaussian scenario ('arithmetic random waves'). In either case we exploit the associated symmetry of the eigenfunctions to show that the expectation (spatial or Gaussian) vanishes. In the deterministic setting, we prove that the variance of the defect of flat eigenfunctions, restricted to balls shrinking above the Planck scale, vanishes for 'most' energies. Hence the defect of eigenfunctions restricted to most of the said balls is small. We also construct 'esoteric' eigenfunctions with large defect variance, by choosing our eigenfunctions so that to mimic the situation on the hexagonal torus, thus breaking the symmetries associated to the standard torus. In the random Gaussian setting, we establish various upper and lower bounds for the defect variance w.r.t. the Gaussian probability measure. A crucial ingredient in the proof of the lower bound is the use of Schmidt's subspace theorem.