The fae smiled, sharply: “Give me your name, child.”
“Uhhhhh. Stick.”
“What.”
“Does Leaf work better? I’m just kinda looking around this clearing. Look, I’m trans, I haven’t decided on one yet, I’m throwing some spaghetti at the wall, you know how it is.”
Fae are born with features sharp and narrow, yet this one seems to soften as Moss looks at it. Its grin— sharp, teeth gleaming, its eyes— cutting, searching, the jut and pull of its jaw enough to scratch glass. It does not blink. Branch does not blink. It softens.
“I said, give me your name, child.”
“I still haven’t picked one,” Grass defends, even now still hoping for a way out of a faeries deal.
“No. But your parents did. Give me your name, child, and it shall no longer be yours. The entity of your name shall no longer exist, and you will be free for whichever name you choose— Leaf, or Stick, or Lichen.”
“…oh.” says Petal, and in the next moment a name falls from their lips. It is not their name. It never has been. The fae is sharp and cutting and witty, that moment of softness an imagined slight.
“Very well, child. Be warned of mushroom circles, should you lose your name again.”
“Okay,” Mushroom smiles, and the Fae pulls itself away from their reality in a swirl of feathers and silk.
When they go home for the first time in two months, their mother frets over them in a way she had not since they were a child, and she calls them by no name at all.
*does the football touchdown symbol with my arms* @shadeshadow234 IS THE MVP!!!! LOVE THIS SHIT!!!
THIS IS LITERALLY EXACTLY HOW IT WORKS
Fae: can i have your na- Me throwing my deadname at them like a fucking baseball: here fucking take it. Im sick of it
One thing I loved about The Future was that the central conflict was very quaint. Steven can’t figure out why the gems aren’t upset he’s leaving. It’s like a season one ep, small scale n’ cute. However, I think they might have done this on purpose to highlight how much steven has grown throughout the series.
Rebecca has said that steven’s biggest vice is that he’s self-sacrificial. He’s deathly afraid of being a bad person, so he’ll often do whatever the noble/virtuous thing to do is, rather than what is true to himself - and that hurts him. She points out that The Test was one of the first times we see this in action. He lies, puts aside how he feels, just to make the gems feel better. At first it seems like maturity, but we learn over the course of the series that this attitude was actually very damaging to his self-worth. This culminates in episodes like Everything’s fine. Pushing aside his feelings about white diamond ‘for the greater good’ caused him to lash out uncontrollably. And he’s so afraid of being a bad person that he lies to everyone about it.
In The Future, we see him start to do this again. He’s hurt that the gems aren’t sad that he’s leaving, but he doesn’t tell them. The noble thing to do would be to not be petty, it was his decision to leave after all. But the moment he turns that car around is the peak of steven’s character development. He finally decides that his feelings are valid, and expressing them doesn’t make him a bad person. He drives straight back to tell the gems how he truly feels. I was in tears y’all.
