coat

One of our friends gave my sister and me a coat she'd inherited from a family member, and since we couldn't both wear it at the same time we decided we'd say it was mine. I wore it quite a bit, and eventually it became my thing. That is, people associated me with the coat and vice-versa. The princess--this was before she inherited that title, I suppose--liked to tease me about how much I liked it, and it was too much energy to argue. And it was a nice coat, I suppose. 

My sister liked using it when we were pretending to be each other, especially once people got wise to the trick and started looking for the little clues they thought we'd overlooked. Somehow it only reinforced the idea everyone had that the coat held some deep sentimental value for me, and at some point everyone else's attachment to the idea of my attachment to this coat stopped wearing on me and became something fun and whimsical I sought out.

It was the coat I wore when they appointed me as her protector, the coat I wore as the fragile order of our world started falling apart. I was wearing that coat when I earned some of my scars, and each time I cleaned it up and patched it. Each patch was a mark of pride, or at least a reminder of what I'd done.

When most of us parted ways for the first time--we could feel disaster approaching even then, years before the war--I gave the coat away as a token of friendship. If she's to be believed, she wore it until it fell apart. By then, she told me, it became something of a legend--but then, she likes telling stories, so of course it did.

The world is altogether less sentimental now, but there's still a place for whim, I think. Even if there's not much hope left there's no harm in a smile and a story about that time your lucky coat protected you from harm.