Yellow Roman Candles

FUCK THIS MOVIE. I HATE THIS MOVIE. There is so much whack shit in this film:

the five sisters are KEIRA KNIGHTLEY, amy dunne, johanna mason, carey mulligan of ‘drive’, doctor who episode ‘blink’ and being the future mom of a mumford’s son fame, and the main girl from st trinians???? WHAT KIND OF WHITE PEOPLE PERFECTION their dad is president snow and their mum was vera in noted television procedural vera???? OKAY

DARCY IS 6’2

MR BINGLEY WAS OCTAVIUS IN ROME AND ALSO HAS THE CHEEKBONES OF A TOLKIEN ELF

JUDI DENCH 

this movie is just Joe Wright Period Period Piece but it is THE EPITOME OF THIS VERY SPECIFIC GENRE. HE’S NOT GONNA TOP THIS AND HE NEEDS TO STOP TRYING the panning shot of the peak district??? ‘Liz On Top Of The World’ plays in the bg it’s the ULTIMATE. 

HOT LIZARD KING WICKHAM

and okay i love how this movie shows the bennets as an actual FAMILY

like they’re messy and tactile and they talk over one another it’s so genuine

AND I LOVE THEIR HOUSE WITH THE CREEPING VINES

and okay the COSTUMES IN THIS MOVIE OH MY GODDD

everyone’s white gowns in the netherfield ball scene? YOOOOOO

honestly the production value of this movie is nuts

it’s the AESTHETIC

alright so jane austen novels are awesome and they show a lot about society and relationships in the regency era

and the thing about 2005 pride and prejudice is that it doesn’t only show the verbal sparring/tension between lizzie and darcy

but the sexual tension as well

THE SEXUAL UNDERTONES OF THIS MOVIE

OH MY GOD

IT’S SO FUCKING MUCH

like every interaction is loaded with like sexy LOOKS and body language

and like they don’t even kiss but it’s so obvious they wanna bang

THEY WANT TO BANG

SO

BAD

it’s like raw magnetism

it’s something people would write ridiculous articles in cosmo about

like that bit where darcy helps lizzie into the carriage???????

HE HELPS HER UP

(IT’S THE 1800S, PEOPLE DONT TOUCH)

she looks at him, scandalised

HE WALKS AWAY, FLEXING HIS HAND AS IF IT’S BURNING

ROMANCE

there’s this scene where lizzie and darcy are dancing in a crowded room but they’re so focused on each other the other people LITERALLY MELT AWAY

LIKE THEY’RE THE ONLY TWO PEOPLE IN THE GOD DAMN UNIVERSE

(sidebar: HER HAIR IN THIS SCENE. GOD DAMN.)

also THE TRACKING SHOT THROUGH THE PARTY OH MY GOD 

and okay, like

let’s not even GET INTO the declaration scene

after a heavy dose of SEXILY AVOIDING EACH OTHER’S GLANCES IN CHURCH the sexual tension crescendos

UNDER THE AWNING OF SOME ANCIENT RUIN

IN THE POURING RAIN

he advances; he admits his love

she REBUKES him

affronted, he insults pretty much everything about her

she responds but rebuking him again but WORSE

but the sexual tension’s still there

there’s just the noise of the rain

the air between them is so charged it could power like

a small city probably

THEY’RE SUPER CLOSE

NO TOUCHEY

AND THEN

HE LEANS FORWARD, EYES LOCKED ON HER LIPS

HE’S GONNA KISS HER

SHE WANTS HIM TO KISS HER

HE DOESN’T KISS HER

THE 

FUCKING

TENSION

I CAN’T EVEN WATCH THIS BIT HONESTLY

and she regrets it immediately after and then he DROPS OFF THE LETTER AND SHE’S JUST SITTING THERE IN SHOCK REALLY

I KNOW BABE. I KNOW

and it’s the kind of movie you can rewatch a hundred times and it’s still as amazing as the first time and you pick up all these little things you missed

it was like my 20th watch when i realised that mary is in love with mr collins

and ok THE LIVING SCULPTURES OF PEMBERLEY SCENE

all the pemberly scenes really like when they show up and lizzie sees this bomb ass house that could’ve been hers and she’s just like, ‘hahahhahahahaha i fucked up, i fucked up. i fucked up so bad im sorry, im trash’

AND WHEN SHE MEETS GEORGIANA AND SHE LOOKS AT LIZZIE AND DARCY LIKE SMIRK.EMOJI

she knows

and the scene where DARCY AND BINGLEY PRACTICE WHAT HE’S GOING TO SAY TO JANE

REGENCY SOFT BRO AF

and the scene before when the bennets rush to make themselves look presentable and it’s sooooo awkward and forced HONESTLY THEY ARE THE BEST

AND JANE AND BINGLEY LOWKEY OTP FINALLY GETTING TOGETHER

AND JANE STANDING THERE IN THE SUNBEAM LOOKING LIKE A LITERAL ANGEL AND TEARS IN HER EYES AS SHE SAYS YES

and then

DARCY

LOOKING LIKE SOME FABIO SHIT

WALING ACROSS THE MOORS

TO HER

WHAT THE HELLLLLL

THE MUSIC SWELLS

HE’S RUGGED

‘YOU MUST KNOW… SURELY YOU MUST KNOW IT WAS ALL FOR YOU’

s t o p

and lizzie is standing there with her artfully messy hair

‘YOU HAVE BEWITCHED ME, BODY AND SOUL, AND I LOVE YOU

I LOVE YOU

I LOVE YOU’

good BYE

and she kisses his hands? NOOOOOOO

THEY GONNA BANG SO MUCH

i keep this movie on every device i have in case i need an emergency pick me up

by dirgewithoutmusic – an AU in which nothing changes except that Snape listens when Lily tells him to stop being a bigoted asshat, they stay friends, and suddenly I care eight million percent more about this trainwreck child and his terrible life

When Severus was seven, he fell in love with the girl down the street. She had long red hair and dirty knees and she offered him half her candy bar one drizzly afternoon, waiting outside the school for her parents to come pick her up.

His parents weren’t coming— dad working late and mum at the pub recounting old Hogwarts glory stories, talking of years when her life was magical– but he didn’t tell Lily that. He was just waiting for the older bully boys who lurked in the empty lot on his way home to get bored and leave.

He ate the candy slowly in neat little bites while she grinned and told him about her big sister’s feud with the science teacher, like her Tuney was some sort of hero in a political espionage drama. She talked with her hands, narrow little things with freckled backs. He watched her wave from the back window of her mother’s car and then he started the long walk home.

When Severus was fifteen, James Potter dangled him upside down in the quad and laughed. Severus landed on elbows and knees. The bruises would stay for a week. The memories would not die with them— James’s cocky grin, the laughter in the spring air, the long whip of Lily’s red hair.

He felt small, bug-like, his knees pressing into the grass. His mother would come home some nights, kick the threadbare carpet, rattle the battered old pans in the cupboard, curse a Ministry that hated purebloods, that sucked up to halfbreeds and Mudbloods, that left the true wizards to rot in filth. He would curl up, make himself small, bug-like, imagine a chitinous shield growing over his shoulders, his spine, the softness of his kidneys. Some days, his father slept through this. Some days he screamed back.

After Severus met Lily, he would curl up under his covers, small, bug-like, and read through the comics she’d lent him with his hands pressed up over his ears. He wanted Professor X to come take him away. He wanted to be someone special, someone saved. He wanted a giant to burst through his door and frighten his mother and offer him a squashed birthday cake and a way out.

When Severus was fifteen, he slammed to his knees on the green Hogwarts quad. Laughter burrowed into his ears, like curses, like the nights his father screamed back, and when Lily stepped toward him he snapped, “I don’t need help from a Mudblood.”

–

When Severus slouched up to her door that summer, Lily didn’t invite him in. She leaned on the open frame of the door, arms crossed. He had so rarely seen Lily neither smiling or incandescent with rage, but she watched him with snakeskin eyes and a set mouth, still.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t–”

She twitched a strand of hair over her shoulder, the irritation the closest thing to an emotion he could spot on her. He was watching, desperate– this was Lily, she gave things away. She talked with her hands. He never felt lost, with her. “But why,” said Lily. “Why are you sorry? Because I’m upset, or because what you did was wrong?”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“You did, and it’s not the point. I don’t care if it’s the part you care about, Sev, it’s not the part that matters. That was an awful thing to say– to say to anyone. You were cruel because you were scared and embarrassed, but Sev I could really care less. You were cruel.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Sorry’s not enough, Sev. Be fucking better.”

He jerked back and tried to turn it into some kind of laugh. “Language, careful, your mum might hear.”

She shrugged, and stepped back through the open door, and shut it in his face.

He spent the summer reading comic books, haunting the local library, then the local park once it’d closed, and then sneaking home when he was hopeful his parents would be asleep. He tried to think about bravery, but sometimes he just thought about Lily’s hair, the way it went more golden in summer. He tried to think about nobility, ethics and grace, but the clouds chased each other, fat and white, across the sky and he wasn’t sure what any of this had to do with him.

His father took him fishing by a dreary brown creek and they sat in silence. Severus could hear every creak of the rods, every lap of the water, every inhale and movement his father made. He thought maybe if he just said nothing, nothing ever, he’d never say anything again that made Lily’s face go so flat and distant. If he said nothing, maybe nothing would hurt.

His father reached back for a beer can in a swift movement and Severus froze himself unflinching. He sat in that silence afterward, slowing his heartbeat, picking apart the sudden rigid shell of his shoulders. His father hummed, cracking the can open like a gunshot.

He sat alone on the Hogwarts Express that year, stuffed in a compartment with a handful of second years who gave him half the seats while they giggled among themselves about the haircut of someone named Gertrude. Every summer’s end, for five years, he and Lily had boarded the train together, pressed their noses to the window glass, and watched the land rush by.

For the first month of school, Severus practiced pausing before he spoke, for seconds, minutes if he needed them. Sometimes he’d add an answer after the conversation had already moved on, bent over his mashed potatoes, weighing words as carefully as he weighed salamander eyes and mandrake root.

(If you crushed firedrake seeds with the flat of your blade, instead of cutting them, they made a more potent potion. The textbooks told you to stir six times counterclockwise to make Sleeping Draught, but he knew–because he had thought, and tried, and tried again–that if you did five counterclockwise and two clockwise the draught would turn that perfect turquoise and the sleep would be dreamless and sweet and deep. He kept notes in his textbook’s margins, because it helped to remember.)

In the second month, he tried to listen. People were starting to think about life after school, a big yawning chasm they were supposed to fill with themselves. People were starting to fall in love, puppyish and petty. People were starting to believe in the war, whispering, dreaming, fearing.

In the common room, one of the kids said something about Mudbloods and Severus’s head snapped up. He tried to imagine a shell growing into his shoulders, over his spine, covering all the soft parts of him. He wanted his covers, he wanted to shrink, he wanted Lily’s boxfuls of comics, but he rose to his feet and snapped back. Sometimes saying nothing hurt people, too. A small Muggleborn in green and silver ducked away to her dorm, clutching quietly at her sleeves.

For the third month, he tried to watch– not for warning sneers or cocky grins, clenched fists and broad shoulders, all the things he’d been watching for since before he could name them– but for the way shoulders might go rigid, the way fists might clench but hide, wishing for something to shield every soft part of them.

Severus was bony and pimply, sixteen years old and graceless in it, but he could be an interruption. He could mock with the best of them, flicking his brows and twisting his nose, and asking pointed questions. He could talk, smart-mouthed and snide, until the focus turned to him, and then he could survive anything they handed out. He could give as good as he got. The pauses were shorter, these days, before he spoke, but they would always be there, an echo offset from the shout, an avalanche that struck late and terrible.

When kids cried in bathrooms or empty classrooms or the library, he didn’t move to comfort them, though he heard them. He didn’t know how. He wrote his own curses, out in the forest where he could scar the trees in experiment, and they all turned out bloody. He loved few things, even Lily, as much as he loved pouring all of himself into his work, until something new and his own grew out of it. He wasn’t sure he’d ever invented something kind.

He didn’t try to find Lily, but he came back from the Forest once and almost tripped over her, half-napping in Hagrid’s pumpkin patch. He stumbled back into a gargantuan gourd while she pushed hair out of her face and peered up at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, after a pause that rumbled and roiled in his gut, that he clung to with both hands, breathing into it and letting his shoulders go soft. “I’m sorry I said it. I’m sorry I made you feel small because I was feeling– small.”

Lily sat up a bit, in the little semi circle she’d built herself of books and scrolls and gobstones and snacks. She had built fairy circles like that, when they were children, of the flowers he’d transfigured for her.

“I’m sorry anyone has to feel that way, ever,” he said. “They shouldn’t. I’m angry anyone has to feel that way.”

“Me, too,” she said, and, fishing around in the detritus that surrounded her, handed him half a candy bar. “C'mon, you want some tea? Hagrid said he’d put a kettle on for me if I finished my Arithmancy.”

–

When Severus was in sixth year, Remus Lupin almost killed him on a moonlit night.

Severus had wanted answers, had wanted to get them in trouble, had wanted something a bit like vengeance, and Sirius had told him about the Whomping Willow. Sirius had grinned when he’d done it, small and bitter, and Severus had wondered if he was fighting with James again, wondering why else he’d sell out his friends.

“I didn’t think–” Sirius tried, the morning after, watching Remus across dry toast and cocoa, big juicy bowls of melon.

“You never do,” Remus snapped. (A bare handful of years later, standing in the smoldering ruins of James and Lily’s house, Remus would think about Sirius’s erratic gaze, the sharp edge of his voice, his last name, and wonder if he should have seen it coming. What here was premeditated? What was mischief? Sirius had once almost painted Remus’s own hands with red blood.)

But for now, Remus was sixteen and angry; he was sixteen and guilty of things that might have happened. He didn’t speak to Sirius for a month.

James refused to speak with Sirius, too, but he only lasted a week. Moony was sulking and Peter was busy studying his little heart out, and James got twitchy without proper and regular socialization.

“I’ll punch him in the nose,” said Lily, when Severus told her. She shifted where she sat cross-legged on the library table, like she might go off and hunt him down that second.

“Black doesn’t deserve the attention,” said Severus.

“Getting his ass kicked by a girl? That type of attention?”

“Getting his ass kicked by Lily Evans,” Severus said. “It’d be an honor and you know it.”

–

Reports of violence outside Hogwarts got worse. People were disappearing. People were whispering, fearing. The papers were ignoring the important things, and feeding off the fearmongering, or so Lily announced in the library while Severus was trying to study.

Alice and Lily had spent years sharing hissed rants in humid greenhouses. Over an undulating bed of luminescent deadly nightshade, Alice bent her head close to Lily’s and asked, “Have you heard of the Order of the Phoenix?”

It took a series of introductions, arguments, and passwords, but a few weeks later Lily trudged out to the Hog’s Head to meet with a group of interested students and graduates. Severus followed behind her, crunching his boots down on top of the smaller footprints she left behind in the snow.

“Is it legal for the Headmaster to recruit students to his guerilla army?” Severus wondered aloud, shoving his freezing hands into his armpits.

“Shush,” said Lily.

When they got into the pub, Severus tried to pretend that no one was looking at him. The only other Slytherin was Kingsley Shacklebolt, now an Auror trainee at the Ministry. Severus tugged Lily over to a pair of seats where he could sit with his back to no one.

There were a few adults in the group– Professor McGonagall, who was perched stiffly on a stool, a slightly smelly man who appeared to be stashing an empty mug into his bag, and a small woman with flyaway hair who had cat dander all over her knees.

Albus Dumbledore rose to his feet, smiling at them in that way of his, like he knew something you didn’t and he was proud of you for it. “Friends,” he began.

The door thudded open and the Marauders burst in, late and pink-cheeked with cold. The headmaster smiled at them, too, and Sirius gave a cheery little salute back.

Severus sunk lower in his chair, staring witheringly over his butterbeer. “You told Potter about it, too?”

“He might as well put all that energy to good use,” said Lily. “And, to be accurate, I told Remus.”

“But Potter, really?” said Severus.

“He and Black cooked up a jinx that gives you a boil every time you say a slur to a Muggleborn,” said Lily. “It was either invite them to Alice’s war club or bake them cookies, and I know where my skills lie.”

Severus sniffed. “Don’t come crying to me if he tugs your pigtails.”

“Come crying to me if he pulls yours, and I’ll deck him,” said Lily.

–

At their third clandestine meeting, Dumbledore pulled Severus aside. Severus kept to the side in these meetings, anyway, so Lily didn’t even notice him go.

Out in the cold side alley, Dumbledore put his hands in the pockets of his robes and watched Severus slowly. Severus felt weighed. After a long moment he lifted his chin and looked back.

“Severus,” said Dumbledore. “I am going to ask something difficult of you. It would mean not coming to meetings anymore. It would mean… a lot of things.” In the decades they would fight this long, quiet war together, Severus would come to know Albus Dumbledore better than most. He would see him tired, see where his enigmas faded into exhausted despair. He would come to know that this hesitancy was something the headmaster would grow out of– one day, when asking children to give their lives for the cause, there would be no stumble to this man’s voice.

“I do want to be here,” Severus said, quiet and trying his best not to be angry with it. “I’m not–” He took a breath, a pause, clung to it with two hands that were trying to be patient. “I know what side I’m on.”

“Of course,” said Dumbledore. “That’s why I’m asking this of you.” He glanced back through the open door, to where Lily was listening intently to Alice.

Words brimmed in Severus’s throat, but he didn’t say them. Not just for her.

“It will be difficult,” said Dumbledore. “It may be heartbreaking. But having a man on the inside might save lives.”

Severus snapped his gaze back to Dumbledore. “You want a spy. You want me to be a spy?”

“In the war that is coming? I think we will need one. We are going in blind and things are only getting darker.”

“I want to fight,” said Severus, and it was still quiet. “I want to stand up for things, for once.”

“This is the fight,” said Dumbledore. “I know what I’m asking, Severus. I know the sacrifices I am asking. But we need you.”

In the warmth of the pub, Lily was talking with her hands. This was a problem for the mug of butterbeer she was holding, which was spilling on her shoes.

“Someone has to,” Severus said, the words feeling dull on his tongue. “And I won’t look out of place there.”

He stopped coming to the Hog’s Head. Dumbledore told him to tell no one, but he told Lily.

–

When he and Lily met up, now, it was out at Hagrid’s after dark or snuck into the kitchens to visit the house elves after hours. When the stained glass peach giggled, Lily liked to giggle right back, even in those days. They toasted each other with hot chocolate that never got lukewarm and they didn’t talk about the war.

At meals, Severus sat with Avery and Mulciber. He drifted through their conversations, picking at his potatoes, answering their words seconds and minutes too late. “I thought that Evans had you wrapped around her little Mudblood finger,” said Avery.

Severus scraped the tines of his fork across his plate. “Seen her mooning around Potter lately?” he said. Avery had already continued on into discussion about holiday plans by the time he said it, but they were used to their housemate’s lags by now. “Found a pretty rich boy and dropped me to the curb.”

In classes, he sat with Narcissa. He could pretend to hate Lily. He could conjure up his mother’s bitter rhetoric on his tongue. But he’d prefer not to tank his studies, and Narcissa at least would see his precise notes as not goodness but ambition.

When Mulciber said hateful things in the Slytherin Common Room, Avery sniggering, Regulus squeaking in wide-eyed amusement, Severus didn’t stand. He didn’t snap out anything. He didn’t laugh, either. He smiled, a cold little thing he’d practiced in the mirror again and again, just the thinning of lips and the lift of a brow.

Meet 63-year-old Lyn Slater, who has, until recently, been an ordinary professor at Fordham University. One day she went to meet a friend for lunch outside the Lincoln Center during New York Fashion Week. Foreign journalists suddenly surrounded her, mistaking her for a fashion icon and attracting spectatorsIt was a defining moment that turned Lyn into an ‘Accidental Icon’. Her blog of the same name, inspired by the experience, soon began making international waves. She is now a public voice against ageism in the fashion industry and the world.

“Fashion and my style help me struggle against that invisibility that comes with age.“

She was once asked about the old notion of ‘dressing for one’s age,’ and her response was clear:

ok so now think of one native american cartoon character you know of or a sports team relating to native americans whether it’s their actual name or their team logo, or a town you live in or near with a “native” name bet a lot of these things came to you right away i bet you didn’t even have to think