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She found it while looking for something to wear to her middle school’s graduation party. It was a dark and drooping dead thing, pushed against the left-most wall of her parents’ (parent’s, she corrected; singular) closet as if it didn’t want to be seen. When she grazed her hands against the fabric, it left dust on her fingertips and streaks of oily night on its surface. Large silver buttons shone in the lamplight like cat eyes: two on its front and one on each cuff. One. Two. One. Two.
The coat was heavier than she expected and swallowed her whole. Its hem tickled her calves and nearly dragged against the hardwood, catching the dirt from her heels as she walked. When she rolled up the sleeves, they became ugly ripples that slid down her arms anyway whenever she moved. In photo albums and sepia tinted memories, its true owner stood tall, unburdened by the weight of the proud fabric. Looking at herself in the mirror, Maka looked more like a girl too old to be playing dress-up doing exactly that. She tried her hardest to feel embarrassed, but the insulated lining kept her warm and smelled very faintly of Mama. It was the last thing in the house that still did.
She thought Papa would be upset when he first saw her, fussing about the other dresses in her wardrobe while gently combing the knots from her hair, anxious as he always was before a dance or recital. Instead, he smiled weakly from his perch on the living room sofa, one side of his lip higher than the other as if he couldn’t be bothered to lift both fully. He didn’t offer to do her hair and she didn’t ask him to. The coat remained unaddressed, recognition in his eyes already dulled by a mid-afternoon hangover. He didn’t notice how the people in the portraits on the wall and mantle mocked him over Jeopardy reruns, Trebek’s enthusiasm drowning out their frozen laughter.
The drive to Death City Middle was tense. Even the car radio seemed hesitant to break the silence, flipping between static and top 40s in a volume that was barely audible. When they pulled up to the front of the school, Papa got out alongside her, surprising Maka (Mama had always been the one to chaperone school events, especially after the first incident involving Sarah’s mother). She didn’t get the chance to ask why before he knelt down on one knee and wrapped his arms around her in a tight embrace, lifting her slightly onto her toes as he did. The stench of Marlboro Reds clung to his hair like unfamiliar perfume.
She wanted to push him away, but something in the way in which he held her made her hesitate. She couldn’t feel his heat through the lining of the coat, but she could feel the pressure of his arms, how they pressed her frame against his chest as if she were his own beating heart. His fingers gripped the fabric on her back with the desperation of a man who had little left to lose, unaware that he had already lost his daughter long before he had his wife. They stayed that way for what felt like hours, Papa with his arms around her while hers were frozen still at her sides, restrained suddenly by the weight of her sleeves. Her classmates and their parents walked around them, careful to keep their distance so that they wouldn’t notice how their eyes were filled with pity.
“Have fun,” she expected Papa to say, or, “I love you.”
So preoccupied with the hot shame tangling in her chest, Maka almost missed it when he whispered into her hair, “I’m sorry.”
She watched the car exit the parking lot, hesitating at the stoplight before turning in the opposite direction of their apartment and towards the downtown district, where the clubs and bars were being roused for Happy Hour. When Papa didn't return to pick her up three hours later, it was the embrace of her mother’s cloak that kept her warm as she walked the long road home.
Maka lived a clumsy, eventful life, and the state of her clothes betrayed exactly that. Her jeans and overalls were stained with grass, shirts with jam and iced tea drowsily knocked over during all-nighters. When her skin was torn open from spills at the park or roughhousing with Black Star, crimson petals and blooms would decorate the fabric before fading into a dry rust.
Each mark was a reminder of a past mistake, making up a mosaic of inadequacies displayed for all the world to see. She wouldn't realize until years later— after months of fighting a war she didn’t ask for but inherited nevertheless— that her clothes also told a story. Snapshots of a youth well-lived and taken away too soon.
She liked Mama’s coat because it knew how to keep secrets. It effortlessly absorbed life’s scars within its inky pelt, hiding food spills just as easily as it did shed blood and tears. No matter how many times she mistreated it, the warmth it provided never once wavered, forgiving and patient with herself where she was not. Maka wondered how many of her mother’s secrets were hidden deep within the threads and what they looked like interlaced with hers. She wondered if the comfort it provided was due to material alone, if high-quality cotton and leather was all that was needed to make a single garment feel so much like home.
Mama’s lingering scent, which was already weak to begin with, had long faded away with time.
Its presence haunted Spirit, tormenting him with memories from decades past, of pressing his lips against bandaged wounds and promises of loyalty that neither teen knew would remain unfulfilled. He began to dread laundry day, the coat bloated with suds heavy as a corpse in his arms. Spirit loved her too much to keep Maka from wearing it, but he always offered alternatives, pointing out cardigans that matched her new shoes when they went shopping or gifting her jackets that he thought she would like, pretty and pink. Of course, Maka never yielded. Watching her grow more and more like Kami was just as much a blessing as it was a curse. He was proud. He was even more terrified.
“Wearing that, you look so much like your mother.”
Lord Death had been the one to first say it aloud, a fact that would curse Spirit for decades after he saw how Maka beamed at the comment. The DWMA enrollment contract looked like a tome caught between her small fingers.
Death knelt down to meet her at eye level and placed a gloved hand on her shoulder. Up close, she noticed that there were only pits where his eyes and mouth would’ve been, though his voice was exceedingly gentle when he spoke. Only Spirit caught the faintest undercurrent of guilt that ran through his words.
“Be sure to take care of that coat, Maka,” he said. “But remember this: you’re not your mother. And your partner, whomever they may be, is not your father.” A sudden chill pierced through her Mama’s warmth where he gripped and pricked at her soul.
“In fact, you have the potential to be so much more.”
He straightened up and plucked the contract from her hands. The ink she had used to sign her name was still wet and had stained her fingertips cobalt blue. He closed his fist and the papers disappeared in a burst of thick smoke, leaving behind not even a single speck of ash.
Her partner treated his clothes like a commodity, mixed his colors with his whites and subsequently threw a fit whenever his underwear was dyed pink. When his laundry was finished, he haphazardly threw them into drawers without folding them, marring their skins deep with wrinkles that only an industrial iron could press flat. The sole exception was the silk suit that haunted the corner of his closet, cocooned in a garment bag and untouched since orientation a mere six weeks prior. It was the only item in his room that was properly on a hanger.
“Aren’t you hot?”
He was wearing a tank top patterned with the logo of a sports team she’d never heard of. It was hardly proper attire for training, much less a hunting mission deep in the heart of the Florida everglades. Around them, clouds of mosquitoes pecked at their skin, leaving behind broken constellations made up of small, angry welts.
Maka wiped the sweat from her brow and said nothing, stepping over the gnarled cypress root that he had stumbled over. She was in a bad mood because of the heat. They both were.
When he realized she wasn’t going to respond, he shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Stubborn girl. Don’t come crying to me if you get heat stroke.”
He wouldn’t get it; at least, that was what she told herself. In truth, she knew that he understood more than anybody the importance of a costume, revealed it the moment he first unpacked and pulled out the single ugliest sweater she had ever seen— a mustard yellow monstrosity with plastic buttons lined like those on a child’s snowman.
He refused to talk about his past, but the sheer juxtaposition between his clothes and the silk phantom in his closet said more than he would ever know, every graphic T-shirt and torn pants the smallest act of rebellion against his upbringing. Perhaps his slovenliness was part of that, too. Or maybe that was just something inherent to being a pre-teenage boy, an indulgence in the entropy of adolescence.
She didn’t comment on it, afraid that he would withdraw even further into himself if she did; or worse, retaliate and expose the vulnerabilities she thought Mama’s coat kept hidden from the world. And when she caught him sitting on the edge of the couch in the early morning, eyes distant and thumbing the letters on his headband’s patches, she didn't mention that either. It was a habit that continued long after he stopped wearing it regularly, peeling stitches reminding himself of what he fought for, who he was, and the life he had rejected to bleed for it:
‘S-O-U-L.’
Soul was perceptive, surprisingly so considering his lax demeanor. He knew that the coat was important even though she hadn’t yet told him why. He never inquired, only watched her reverence with a rehearsed indifference, hoping to forge an unspoken truce to leave alone his own secrets. So when a fight goes sour and leaves a row of gashes across the back of her Mama’s coat, he doesn’t flinch at her whinging or suggest she leave it behind, even when the extra mass causes him to stumble while supporting her uninjured side. Instead, he merely snapped into her ear, “Be thankful that you’re the one in one piece instead!”
She wanted to blame him, but she knew as well as he did that in his weapon form, he was only as capable as she was. Somehow, she thought that the coat was invulnerable, that she was, almost, as long as she wore it. The pre-kishin’s claws left behind chasms in the fabric that each spilled a single, ugly truth: Too slow. Too inexperienced. Too weak.
Too human.
As always, her blood remained invisible on its dark pelt. Phantom pain bloomed on her back where the pre-kishin failed to pierce her skin, numbing the deep cuts and bruises on her body where it actually did.
As a precaution, Maka was forced to stay overnight at the infirmary. Mama’s coat was draped over the railing at the end of the bed, its hem gently sweeping the linoleum in the air conditioning. Soul stood vigil by her side, wearing the same guilt that lined his face whenever she was injured, turning his face away as they spoke so that she wouldn’t see it deepen. They observed each other silently, unsure, their partnership too young to dictate whether the appropriate response was apology or sympathy.
The evening bell tolled in the distance, its song faint from within the walls of the clinic. The nurse would be arriving soon to change her bandages and usher any remaining guests out. Soul began to gather his stuff. When he noticed the coat touching the floor, he paused to lift the hem and fold it over itself, taking the time to smooth out its surface with a care he had never shown his own clothes. He didn’t leave immediately afterwards, instead resting his hand on its surface as if searching for something.
“See you tomorrow, Maka.”
Unable to do anything else, she counted the sound of his footsteps as they echoed throughout the empty halls, each growing fainter than the last until they disappeared entirely.
When she woke the next day, the late afternoon sunlight had already filled the room. A tray of food was balanced on the stool beside her with an empty space where the pudding cup would normally rest, indicating the missing presence of a certain sweets-inclined weapon.
After finishing her meal, she reached for Mama’s coat and dragged it towards her, ignoring the hammering pain from her bruised ribs as she did. Her hands instinctively sought the comfort that came from caressing its surface, smooth as a starless night. They froze when they instead brushed against a series of ridges barely protruding from the back of the coat. The space where evidence of the pre-kishin’s claws once was was now closed with fine thread; from afar, it looked like it had never been damaged at all.
Upon closer inspection, the stitches were shaky and uneven. The use of black thread must’ve made the task more difficult and it showed, repeating X pattern forming peaks and valleys that jutted out at all angles. Yet despite its imperfections, they held firmly, refusing to yield even as she pinched and pulled the surrounding fabric, her own mistakes sealed with those of another. It was a scar, the first one that successfully marred the hide of her Mama’s coat. It was a symbol that it survived— that she survived— secret to all the world except herself and the anonymous seamstress.
Soul entered the infirmary after class, carrying a stack of books that she had asked him to check out from the library the night prior. As he set them on the nightstand, Maka grabbed the coat and raised it towards him.
“Did you see anybody touching this earlier?” she asked. “Maybe sometime during lunch while I was sleeping?”
“Good to see you too,” he mumbled before squinting at the coat. He shook his head. “Nope. Nobody here except the nurses. What’s up?”
“Somebody sewed up the holes from the other day. Look.”
She held it out towards him, backside facing upwards to expose the stitches. His hand hovered over the fabric, unmoving, until she realized that he was waiting for permission. When she nodded, he petted them gently, as if afraid of reopening the tears.
“Whoever it was, they did a shit job of it,” he concluded, settling down onto the stool beside her. “My gran would have their head if she saw this.”
He pointed at the bunched up fabric surrounding the stitches. “See that? That means that the stitching is way, way too tight. And the spacing here looks horrible— it’s obvious they didn’t even bother to use a machine. It probably would’ve been better if they’d just minded their own business in the first place.”
“That doesn’t matter,” she said, surprising both of them. “They cared enough to try. As long as I can still wear it, I don’t care how bad it looks.”
He frowned. “All they did was ruin it again. If you find whoever did this, you should teach them a lesson on respecting someone’s privacy.”
“Honestly, I want nothing more right now than to just thank them.” She traced her finger along the crooked lines knowingly. “Whoever they are, I’m sure their partner is very lucky to have them.”
He remained quiet, watching her thumb take in each and every flaw. “It was probably just the night staff,” he said after she reached the end of the row. “Either that or fairies.”
She laughed. “I never struck you as the type to believe in fairy tales, Soul.”
“I didn’t until I moved here. Now? I believe in just about anything.”
They moved on to different topics, the mystery of the fixed coat forgotten for the rest of the evening. Whenever he subconsciously picked at the bandages decorating his fingertips, freshly applied and baby blue, she turned her gaze away, soul humming with silent gratitude.
As the missions they took increased in difficulty, more cracks appeared in her mother’s black armor. Droplets of acidic saliva and blood left behind unsightly clusters of holes. Hems and sleeves frayed at the edges, threatening to unravel entirely. They became easier to ignore as Maka’s focus shifted solely to survival: the next hunt, the next egg, the next injury.
Yet even when she never mentioned it, the coat would always be mended within the first week of its damaging. Holes were patched with matching fabric, tears closed and tidied. Whenever she would try to thank Soul, he would cock his head and say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Must be the fairies that follow you around.”
The fairies’ skills improved, their influence on the coat becoming near invisible as time went on. Each repair was done neater than the last until they eventually graduated to using something called a backstitch, which Soul assured her was the strongest type of stitch that could be done by hand (with only the slightest hint of pride). Whenever the working material went from cloth to Maka’s own flesh, however, the fairies never came. Luckily for her, a simple whip stitch was enough to reunite the pieces, delicate and thin.
“Don’t you want to wait for the fairies?” She laughed. The sound was faint to her ears and sounded more like a strangled choke.
Soul was holding the tip of a needle over a handheld lighter. The weak flame swayed back and forth, the shadows on his face ebbing with its tempo. He wasn’t smiling.
“This was all that your insurance would cover, unfortunately,” he joked. An automatic response. “EaterCare or nothing.”
“I knew we should’ve gone with Cigna instead.” She sighed, leaning her back against the edge of the bathtub, solid and cold against her bare skin.
Everything had become cold since the adrenaline wore off: the pavement, the summer night air, Soul’s body rubbing against Mama’s coat as he half-carried her back to the motel. She was cold. The gash in her side pulsed and spilled warmth from between her fingers, gathering into a red pool on the linoleum. An unopened bottle of Smirnoff loomed over her from the sink, stolen from their room’s refrigerated mini bar, glass sweating with condensation.
Soul remained silent as he prepared. His shaking hands struggled to thread the needle and succeeded after the sixth try. Maka wondered what color thread would look best with her eyes, but before she could open her mouth to ask, he was already by her side, coaxing her palm from over the wound. It slid easily over her blood soaked stomach.
It hurt.
“Ready?” he said, passing her a wrung T-shirt. It was a formality to ask but she nodded anyway, sticking the cloth between her teeth as Soul broke the seal of the vodka.
She didn’t remember entirely what came after the affirmation, only snapshots of sensations from what felt like a bad dream. She remembered the brief relief of chilled liquid before an excruciating burning spread from her side and through her bloodstream. She remembered the warmth of Soul’s heaving breaths as he tried to still his shaking hands, the scent of caramel ration bars mingling with bile.
She remembered drifting into blessed darkness until a sharp stab yanked her back into consciousness, an event that happened over and over again in a cycle she swore would never end. In her delusions, the minuscule needle was actually the beak of Prometheus' eagle, the porcelain bathtub jagged rock digging into the small of her back. This must have been a divine punishment, handed to her personally from Lord Death himself.
Distantly, she heard a baritone drone that almost formed words if she focused hard enough. Soul was trying to keep her awake by talking, but whenever she tried to reply, a stab of pain would shoot through her side and catch her voice before it could leave her mouth.
She began to dream of fairies.
If she wished hard enough, maybe she could summon a Godmother that would allow her to sink into unconsciousness for the remainder of the night. Maka didn’t have any wicked step-sisters or mothers, but she had suffered enough, hadn’t she? And when she finally arrived, the fairy would gently push Soul aside and heal her with a wave of her hand, whispering a magic spell in the ancient language of the fairies. There would be no pain and not even the faintest outline of a scar.
But when she tried to summon her, the only image she could conjure was of Mama, coat swelling behind her like raven wings. Her mouth was frozen in a cruelly inviting smile. A song drifted in and out of Maka’s ears in her Mama’s voice, sung in the same timbre as the lullabies of her early youth:
“Cinderella, you're a sun set in a frame. Though you're dressed in rags, you wear an air of queenly grace. Anyone can see a throne would be your proper place.”
She caught her fairy at work three days after the battle.
He was on the floor underneath the living room window, illuminated only by the jaundice yellow light from passing cars and streetlamps outside. In his hand, a needle swooped and dove into her Mama’s coat, dragging behind a thin piece of black thread. She watched him in the hallway in secret, leaning the shoulder of her uninjured side against the wall.
Twice, he had pulled his hand away from the cloth as if it had bitten him and hissed; unable to see in the dim light, he must’ve pricked himself with the needle. Each time it happened, he would wipe the bead of blood onto his shirt before it could fall onto the coat and return back to work. When he finished, both she and the coat would have matching scars running across their abdomen, mended by the same patient hand.
Soul treated it gently and apologetically, as if it were an extension of herself. He refused to rest until both coat and wearer were whole once more, eagerly awaiting for the next opportunity to be torn open again (and again, and again).