C'est Un Fucking Pomme

📍Istanbul, October 2025

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POV: Faith Lehane

Pairing: Willow/Faith

Word count: 6,562

S7 AU

She comes to you in October. When the leaves are falling all red and golden from the trees that overlook the Northern California Women’s Facility. They fall like rain and you watch them from the window in your cell. When the wind gets high some of them blow into the yard, and in the two precious hours you’re allowed out there you get to pick a few up, and it makes you feel free, makes you feel like a kid again. You pick up a big one - a perfect crisp orange leaf with three prongs, that looks like it came out of a picture book. And it makes you remember what freedom was like. What childhood was like.

i hate this so much but this knowledge is too powerful to keep from you all.

last night @phaltu discovered that setting your font to comic sans in google docs improves writing speed and creativity by an insane amount. “no” i said and “die” but then i tried it and god. i wish it wasn’t this way. i wish it wasn’t true. i wish i could protect you all from this but it’s real. 

something about this font is so disarming. something about this font lets you look past the shape of the words and into their soul. i’ve never written so much as i did last night, on my phone, at 2am, in comic sans.

One serif font (like Times New Roman, but not Times New Roman. Casalon, Garamond, look for one that you like. This is a “final font” for printed papers, for the body of the paper.

Two Sans Serif fonts, one that looks really good in bold, and the other Verdana or something similar. The bold one (Arial is fine, I guess.) is for headlines, and should be used at the very end of your formatting after you’ve written everything. The one that is readable and friendly is a final font for things that are more likely to be read on screen.

And last, pick out a REALLY basic font like Comic Sans (but it’s far from the only one of its ilk) and use that to write in.

I actually write in Verdana most of the time. I have my google doc preferences set to that. (Note that if you use Google Doc styles, you can do big font changes in the style, rather than selecting the whole damn document every time. Only use styles if doing so doesn’t slow you down.)

Remember that the font you write in is 97% irrelevant to the final result. You should ALWAYS be switching fonts as a late editing stage, so that you will catch typos you missed due to acclimating to the letter shapes of the font you do your main work in.

This is an executive function prop, like, oh, packing a lunch and picking out clothes the night before to make it easier to get out the door when you’re too tired to brain.

*note on finished text fonts: Times New Roman is very standard and useful for submissions, so as not to annoy editors. Palatino is very wide, and takes up a lot of room, if you’re working by page count and your teacher doesn’t mind, it can flesh things out. Only use it if you haven’t been told to use a specific font. If you are, on the other hand, making a zine or some such, Garamond is incredibly narrow and still readable, which may allow you to boost your font size a little and not take up more space than Times would at a smaller font size. Caslon is just pretty. Your main choice of text font should have included italics, bold, condensed if you ever do anything more fancy than slapping text on a page.

For screen reading fonts, I use the Google Fonts database to pick out fonts that are particularly useful for me. I like ones where the p/q/b/d are not rotations of each other, and where the script capitals are highly and rapidly legible.

well. hm. it was a deer in the way that a graveyard is a playground. you can treat it as such, I guess, but it won’t feel the same.

it was about thirty feet away from me, staring. wild deer don’t stare at random people to begin with- they just run away. she was breathing hard and making a low rumbling sound. I didn’t really know what to do, and I hadn’t really thought about the dangers of going near wild animals even if they are “harmless” deer, so I went towards her.

I swear to god, this thing’s eyes blanked out and it took a couple jerking steps forward, moving really strangely? and I flinched, because what the hell, and then she ran off to the side while staring at me until she was about fifty feet away. it was deeply unsettling in a way that I can’t explain and I know that that thing was not quite a deer.

I’ve heard “Deer” comes from “Deor” which just means “beast” or “quadruped” so… it was definitely a Deor, but 100% not a Deer. 

I collect spooky stories from other people and a friend once told me about driving back from a “ghost hunt” out in SE Oklahoma, seeing what they described as “like a deer” that stood in the middle of the road, and refused to move. So when one of them got out to go shoo it away by hand they all realized, about the same time… that it was only almost a deer. They described the collective reaction as wildly disproportionate to what they remember having seen - which was just … not quite a deer?