HC: The Pendant's Meaning in Eden, Simon's Bracelet Knots
The headcanon of Eden's pendant being a last name you wear rather than speak broke me. Simon doesn't have a last name because that fingerprint-level uniqueness of the leaf is his whole identity, and without it, he's a no-one. It's a call-sign, a dog tag, a passport, an ID.
The SM-13's previous pilot chose to die a nobody, because he stashed it away into that terminal for the chance it might be recognized in someone who would understand what it meant.
It means Simon has been living as a nobody for almost his entire adult life, if we go by the game timeline.
He's "just Simon" because they took the other name.
It means Simon "carried the baton" for the last guy, literally adopted his identity as the new SM pilot, became a person again, with a purpose, and a will to live. It's a hope symbol because it literally, in-universe, is one.
The Other Side by myself, and Allow me to live and I'll be anything you want by @lady-nienna both utilize this idea, and it's genuinely some of the toughest stuff I've had to write.
”To take someone’s pedant when they’re still alive is an excommunication,” [...] ”Your unbecoming. To take the pedant away means you never existed. It’s a death sentence in every sense.” - Allow me to live and I'll be anything you want
It lived against your skin the way a shadow lives against the ground, present in every room you'd ever stood in, every meal, every prayer, every fight, every grave you helped dig for someone smaller and more grief-stricken than you. [...] and there had never once in the history of Eden been two that matched. - The Other Side
To make this worse, I've give even more meaning to Simon's bracelet (the original one with the official style guide-confirmed rosary knots in it):
Simon runs his fingers along the rosary knots in his bracelet. They hadn't taken the barren thing. Wasn't valuable enough.
Each little bump served as a verse. A prayer he had braided into it out of respect for the lives he took. He'd whispered it so many times in the throes of battle that it had been engraved into his memory. It was no Edenic rite, but something more personal. Not many pendants bore these knots. Simon might have been a weapon, but he was never disrespectful to the dead... unless it was for looting purposes. Fair game was fair game. He was a precision instrument and a survivalist, not a monster.
One. You live in me,
Well, he told himself that, anyway.
Two. That I might remember all whom my blade passes,
He isn't so sure, anymore.
Three. Forgiven in my stead.
The last line originally said, "all who perish return to the Garden," but it started to feel wrong after the Garden died, so he changed it.
- The Other Side
Fucking horrifying. I love everything about this.
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