#Scrap metal collection in london

[danielpscrapdealer]

Scrap metal collection in London:Scrap metal collection in London provides a hassle-free solution for disposing of metal waste. With prompt pickups and competitive pricing, these services help transform scrap into reusable materials. By choosing a professional scrap metal collection, Londoners can support sustainability, declutter their spaces, and earn money for their unwanted metal.to know more visit the link:https://bit.ly/3SJPRc3

[jewish-sideblog]

During last year’s Chanukkah, I toured Yad Vashem. My tour guide ended with a story that will probably stick with me for the rest of my life.

A Jewish father and his son are held prisoner in Auschwitz— they are lucky, all things considered. Most Jews were gassed upon arrival. The Nazi guards instruct the prisoners that they have to dig mass graves for their fellow Jews every day. The father is appalled by this, of course, but he doesn’t have much choice. A week goes by, and the father and the son are subjected to horrors they could not have imagined before. The first Friday evening in Auschwitz, the father goes to his son and says, “I cannot work on Shabbat. I will not dig graves for Jews on Shabbat. For all my other reservations, I cannot do it, because the Talmud forbids it.” The son is barely fourteen, but he knows that if his father refuses to work, then his father will die. So he goes to meet another prisoner, a former Rabbi. The son pleads with the Rabbi to help his father see sense, and so the Rabbi and the son go together to meet with the father.

“The Talmud forbids us to work on Shabbat,” the Rabbi says, “but pikuach nefesh overrides Talmudic law when a life is in danger. Your life is in danger. Your son’s life is in danger. You are allowed to work on Shabbat.” The father begrudgingly agrees, and he saves his family’s life by digging mass graves on the day of rest.

A few months go by, and the Nazis are running low on food, so they start grinding pig hooves and guts into the slop that gets fed to the prisoners at Auschwitz. The father finds out about this and begins to starve himself. “G-d commands in the Torah us not to eat pork,” he says. The son, out of concern for his father, gets the Rabbi again. “Pikuach nefesh overrides the Torah as well as the Talmud. You must eat, for your life and for your son’s sake. Eat what is given to you. G-d will overlook violating kosher if it means surviving in a place like this.” So the father starts to eat what he is given.

Miraculously, the father and the son survive until winter. There’s never enough food for all the prisoners in Auschwitz to eat, and so there are frequent fights over scraps, but the most valuable thing in the slop is fat. Fat can keep you warmer in the winter, and it can be used to cover up and heal small injuries. If the Nazi guards noticed so much as a scratch on you, they would send you to the gas chambers that same day. Fat was gold in Auschwitz. At some point, the son noticed that the father had been ignoring food and collecting fat. He wasn’t trading it for scraps or favors, he was just keeping it. And he was starving to keep it. So once again, the son and the Rabbi approached the father.

“I’m turning it into a candle,” he said, “for Channukah.” The son and the Rabbi were appalled. The Rabbi said, “Channukah is a cultural holiday. It is not ordained by G-d. Neither the Torah nor the Talmud command you to celebrate it. Why in G-ds name would you sacrifice your food for that?” The father replied,

“You can live three days without water. You can live three weeks without food. But you cannot live three minutes without hope.”

The son and the Rabbi helped the father fashion wicks from rags and clothes, and helped steal small bits metal of metal off corpses and guards to make a spark. They lit Channukah candles in the middle of a Nazi concentration camp. The father and the son survived off of hope for the rest of that year, and they both lived to see the liberation of Auschwitz. The father died soon afterwards, but the son, Hugo Gryn, went on to become a Rabbi himself. In fact, the Rabbi of West London Synangoue, and the leader of the British Reform movement. He was described as the most beloved Rabbi in the country. He never lost sight of hope.

[berie-kat]

Lore (part 2/2)!

Ale Story

Flying out of his mother , being named after his mother's favorite beverage, and having a strong spirit, Ale was born. He grew up on the seas with his parents who were captains of a pirate ship.

He lived an adventurous life on the sea. Seeing new places and exploring the unknown sea banks, Ale grew a great love for the ocean and its inhabitants. He grew with a crew that taught him everything and learned self defense.

He never learned to fight with swords because he never grew to enjoy the dark sides of being in a pirate crew. He instead enjoyed learning of life in the waters and helping keep the ship clean. Being good parents they accepted Ales' decisions and allowed him to live a peaceful life of no blood and gave him notebooks and pens to write and began learning his love for the ocean.

Ale soon learned to also enjoy mechanics and started to collect scraps to make all kinds of things. Creating fins for sea creatures that lost one. Helping ecosystems grow, he grew to want to help the waters in any shape and form.

At the age of 16 something happened that changed his life. It started after they were ambushed by other pirates in the middle of the night. He was on deck with his parents when someone yelled at the ship coming towards them.

His parents shouted to him to go into his quarters to wait out the attack. Before he could go they were already under attack. Ale was scared in the middle of the chaos and looked all around.

He then saw his mother being knocked down and an enemy above him. In sheer desperation to save his mother he ran and tackled the enemy down. He tried to hold the man down but he was overpowered,he looked to his mother but she was already on her feet fighting another. She yelled for him and told him to not give up.

When his enemy stood above him, and held a sword out. Ale kicked him in the shin and grabbed the sword away from the man. With shaking hands he stood up and held the sword pointed at the other.

The man was angry and got up and charged at Ale. They both were in the struggle trying to grab the sword.

In the end Ale won the struggle and in a panic he stabbed the man in the chest. He was in shock at what he did and stared at the other who was shocked as well, before falling to the floor. Ale fell as well and pushed himself away from the man crying. In agony the Man pulled out the sword from his chest and threw it at Ale. He finally collapsed onto the ground staring at Ale blankly.

Ale only could stare back in tears. He repeated apology after apology to this man he never met, but just killed. Before the other passed he said the words it's his fault, never closing his eyes he kept on staring at Ale even after death. All Ale could do was stare back, not being able to move. Not hearing the yells for him.

He hadn’t realized he had been picked up and moved to somewhere else. All he could see were those eyes staring at him in hatred.

After that Ale refused to speak of the event, and hated eye contact ever since. He began to hate being on the ship and barely left his quarters. After a year he told his parents he wanted to leave the ship, and that he wasn’t happy there.

They accepted his decision and helped him to move to land. He decided to move to London and continue to study marine bio engineering . He felt safer to study there than on that ship so he began to deep dive and found more interesting studies of mythical sea creatures that he wished to study more and create new machines.

One day, when he was found out for studying rogue science subjects and was being chased. He met a man that introduced him to a society, a place where he could be surrounded by people like him that loved science and hoped to create new ideas.

Still he was very indecisive at joining because he didn’t know if he could handle so many people and all those people staring and wanting to talk to him. Jekyll, hearing of his struggle, decided to give him something to help.

Feeling a heavy metal dropped onto him. He looked up to see Jekyll gave him a Scuba Helmet. Jekyll told him that this could help him. No one could stare him in the eyes and he didn’t have to stare back. He felt safe in the helmet and thanked Jekyll for the gift.

He soon joined the society with his helmet and his confident personality back. Growing taller and stronger from working and building in a community he loved, Ale became a loved person in the society. All those who would need help Ale landed a hand.

He’s not great at reading rooms or understanding people’s feelings, but he’s loved even for his unusual personality.

I love him so much, such a smart dumb man <3

Thank you for reading this, Im not a writer so if it’s not perfect I apologize Im trying my best :)

Hopefully I can post more of them if you guys like to see more of them.

Kay bye!!

[solarpunkbusiness]

The factory in south Wales, which has been under construction since March 2022, is designed to extract gold from up to 4,000 tonnes a year of circuit boards sourced in the UK from electronics including phones, laptops and TVs.

The Royal Mint, which has produced coins for more than 1,100 years, has said the process could provide hundreds of kilograms of gold annually for its 886 jewellery range. This business, which launched in 2022, sells high-end rings, necklaces and earrings online and from its boutique in Burlington Arcade, in Mayfair, central London.

It is estimated that about 600 mobile phones will have to be processed to create one of the 7.5g gold rings sold in the 886 collection, which are similar to the weight of a £1 coin.

The factory in Llantrisant will use patented new chemistry – created by the Canadian clean technology firm Excir – to recover the gold. A washing machine-style spinning drum washes the pieces of circuitry containing gold in a special acid mix that dissolves the precious metal in four minutes. That compares with other gold extraction processes that are more energy intensive and tend to require extremely high temperatures over a longer period of time.

The new factory is part of the Mint’s ongoing efforts to diversify its business as cash use continues to decline. The business is 100% owned by the UK Treasury and pays a dividend to the government each year, with remaining profits reinvested in the business.

[quotesfrommyreading]

It is August 1854, and London is a city of scavengers. Just the names alone read now like some kind of exotic zoological catalogue: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers, shoremen. These were the London underclasses, at least a hundred thousand strong. So immense were their numbers that had the scavengers broken off and formed their own city, it would have been the fifth-largest in all of England. But the diversity and precision of their routines were more remarkable than their sheer number. Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water's edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long pole that they used to test the ground in front of them, and to pull themselves out when they stumbled into a quagmire. The pole and the eerie glow of the lantern through the robes gave them the look of ragged wizards, scouring the foul river's edge for magic coins. Beside them fluttered the mud-larks, often children, dressed in tatters and content to scavenge all the waste that the toshers rejected as below their standards: lumps of coal, old wood, scraps of rope.

Above the river, in the streets of the city, the pure-finders eked out a living by collecting dog shit (colloquially called “pure”) while the bone-pickers foraged for carcasses of any stripe. Below ground, in the cramped but growing network of tunnels beneath London's streets, the sewer-hunters slogged through the flowing waste of the metropolis. Every few months, an unusually dense pocket of methane gas would be ignited by one of their kerosene lamps and the hapless soul would be incinerated twenty feet below ground, in a river of raw sewage.

The scavengers, in other words, lived in a world of excrement and death. Dickens began his last great novel, Our Mutual Friend, with a father-daughter team of toshers stumbling across a corpse floating in the Thames, whose coins they solemnly pocket. “What world does a dead man belong to?” the father asks rhetorically, when chided by a fellow tosher for stealing from a corpse. “'Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world.” Dickens' unspoken point is that the two worlds, the dead and the living, have begun to coexist in these marginal spaces. The bustling commerce of the great city has conjured up its opposite, a ghost class that somehow mimics the status markers and value calculations of the material world.  Consider the haunting precision of the bone-pickers' daily routine, as captured in Henry Mayhew's pioneering 1844 work, London Labour and the London Poor:

It usually takes the bone-picker from seven to nine hours to go over his rounds, during which time he travels from 20 to 30 miles with a quarter to a half hundredweight on his back. In the summer he usually reaches home about eleven of the day, and in the winter about one or two. On his return home he proceeds to sort the contents of his bag. He separates the rags from the bones, and these again from the old metal (if he be luckly enough to have found any). He divides the rags into various lots, according as they are white or coloured; and if he have picked up any pieces of canvas or sacking, he makes these also into a separate parcel. When he has finished the sorting he takes his several lots to the ragshop or the marine-store dealers, and realizes upon them whatever they may be worth. For the white rags he gets from 2d. to 3d. per pound, according as they are clean or soiled. The white rags are very difficult to be found; they are mostly very dirty, and are therefore sold with the coloured ones at the rate of about 5 lbs. for 2d.

The homeless continue to haunt today's postindustrial cities, but they rarely display the professional clarity of the bone-picker's impromptu trade, for two primary reasons. First, minimum wages and government assistance are now substantial enough that it no longer makes economic sense to eke out a living as a scavenger. (Where wages remain depressed, scavenging remains a vital occupation; witness the perpendadores of Mexico City). The bone collector's trade has also declined because most modern cities possess elaborate systems for managing the waste generated by their inhabitants. (In fact, the closest American equivalent to the Victorian scavengers – the aluminium-can collectors you sometimes see hovering outside supermarkets – rely on precisely those waste-management systems for their paycheck.) But London in 1854 was a Victorian metropolis trying to make do with an Elizabethan public infrastructure. The city was vast even by today's standards, with two and a half million people crammed inside a thirty-mile circumference. But most of the techniques for managing that kind of population density that we now take for granted – recycling centers, public-health departments, safe sewage removal – hadn't been invented yet.

And so the city itself improvised a response – an unplanned, organic response, to be sure, but at the same time a response that was precisely contoured to the community's waste-removal needs. As the garbage and excrement grew, an underground market for refuse developed, with hooks into established trades. Specialists emerged, each dutifully carting goods to the appropriate site in the official market: the bone collectors selling their goods to the bone-boilers, the pure-finders selling their dog shit to tanners, who used the “pure” to rid their leather goods of the lime they had soaked in for weeks to remove animal hair. (A process widely considered to be, as one tanner put it, “the most disagreeable in the whole range of manufacture.”)

We're naturally inclined to consider these scavengers tragic figures, and to fulminate against a system that allowed so many thousands to eke out a living by foraging through human waste. In many ways, this is the correct response. (It was, to be sure, the response of the great crusaders of the age, among them Dickens and Mayhew.) But such social outrage should be accompanied by a measure of wonder and respect: without any central planner coordinating their actions, without any education at all, this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people. The great contribution usually ascribed to Mayhew's London Labour is simply his willingness to see and record the details of these impoverished lives. But just as valuable was the insight that came out of that bookkeeping, once he had run the numbers: far from being unproductive vagabonds, Mayhew discovered, these people were actually performing an essential function for their community. “The removal of the refuse of a large town,” he wrote, “is, perhaps, one of the most important of social operations.” And the scavengers of Victorian London weren't just getting rid of that refuse – they were recycling it.

  —  The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World (Steven Johnson)

[dailyunsolvedmysteries]

Did the Titanic Really Sink or was it Olympic?

The sister ships (and their third counterpart, the Britannic) were owned by White Star Line. The Olympic was put into service in June, 1911. She collided with another ship, the HMS Hawke, in September of 1911 and both ships were badly damaged. The accident was a financial disaster for White Star Line, as they were found to be liable for the accident and had to pay for the damages to both ships and legal fees for court cases associated with the accident. Repairs on the Olympic took nearly two months and parts intended for the Titanic, which was still being built during this time, had to be given to the Olympic instead. Only a few weeks after being returned to service, the Olympic suffered another minor incident where one of the propellers broke off and pieces intended for the Titanic were once again cannibalized.

The Titanic was finally finished and ready to leave port on her maiden voyage on April 10, 1912, having been delayed while new parts were made and delivered to replace the ones needed for the Olympic, and from there we all know the story. She went first to France, and then to Ireland, and then began her trek across the Atlantic to New York, during which she struck an iceberg and after nearly two hours, sank, taking 1,500 souls with her to a cold, watery grave that would not be seen again by human eyes for nearly a hundred years.

The Olympic went on to have a 24-year career as a successful ocean liner. She served during World War 1 where she earned the nickname Old Reliable for her impenetrable hull, and then in 1919 she was re-outfitted to be a civilian passenger ship and served as an ocean liner until 1935, when she was retired from the fleet. Her ownership changed hands several times and she was eventually dismantled and sold for scrap metal.

But what if it wasn't the Titanic that sank? What if it was actually the Olympic? What if it was a ploy to remove a faulty ship that was costing them more money than she was bringing in for White Star Line and cash in on her million-pound insurance policy?

What if at some point after the Titanic was completed, they switched the identities of the ships. The new "Titanic" was actually the Olympic and the "Olympic" was actually the brand-spanking-new Titanic, fresh from the construction yard with zero problems and zero history. They intended for the "Titanic" to suffer some sort of failure that would result in the destruction of the problem ship so they could collect the insurance money. its doubtful they intended to also cause the deaths of 1,500 people; the events that transpired which led to the sinking of the "Titanic" possibly happened purely by chance and the iceberg wasn't part of their plan (i.e., they didn't hire the captain to specifically ram the iceberg to sink the ship or anything like that). They probably had another plan involving the repairs that had already been made on the ship when it collided with the HMS Hawke.

After the sinking of the "Titanic," White Star Line received a tidy sum of £1,000,000 in insurance money (or £89,289,575 in today's money). This, of course, ruined the insurer, Lloyd's of London. There's an additional conspiracy theory that American financier and banker J. P. Morgan was in on this whole scheme; his company, J. P. Morgan & Co., financed the International Mercantile Marine Company in the hopes of becoming rich off of sea travel, but this turned out to be a bad investment because of the unpredictable nature of sea travel and travelers themselves. J. P. Morgan or one of his associates may have schemed with White Star Line, who was a subsidiary of this IMMC, in order to bankrupt the IMMC and allow J. P. Morgan & Co. to withdraw from the IMMC without breaking a contract. I cannot provide evidence for this beyond speculation.

However, there is evidence that backs up the claim that the two ships were switched and it was the Olympic who sank, not the Titanic.

This is an image of the RMS Olympic in drydock 

Check out the very top row of portholes in the white railing. Count them. Look closely at the grouping of the last five portholes and how they are clustered with two close together, one set apart, and two more close together.

This is an image of the RMS Titanic being built:

Look at the top-most portholes in the railing on the Titanic. Count them too. Look at the last five portholes and see that they are evenly spaced apart.

This is a picture of the "Titanic" before leaving on its maiden voyage. Check out the portholes in question:

Here is the "Olympic" in New York after the sinking of the "Titanic":

There is no reason why the ship builders would have changed the portholes on the Titanic when they were nearly done building it. That piece was not one of the pieces cannibalized from the Titanic to repair the Olympic that would have needed to be replaced by a different piece. The only answer is that the ship in the final picture, which is the ship that left port on April 10, 1912, and was met with a terrible fate near Newfoundland, was not the Titanic, but actually the Olympic.

It’s doubtful we'll ever know one way or another, since the wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic is quickly being covered with sediment and will be completely buried and inaccessible soon and pieces of the ship that was retired in 1935 and dismantled in 1937 are both difficult to find and difficult to authenticate, and anybody who might be able to either confirm or deny this theory are all dead.

[onceuponabarnes]

Focus, Sir

summary \\ ceo!bucky and assistant!reader confront their feelings after a late night in the office together

word count \\ 1.4k

warnings \\ possible age gap relationship hinted (not mentioned, though), boss/employee relationship

this was written as part of @celestialbarnes​‘s 4k writing challenge, using the prompts ceo!bucky and “stop biting your lip, i can’t focus at all” “make me” which have been put in bold :)

Being James Barnes’ assistant wasn’t exactly the typical job you thought you’d be accepting. You thought you’d be making appointments and posting letters and collecting dry cleaning, not poring over his diary by soft lamp light in the early hours of the morning with your faces only inches apart.

“You can’t make that appointment,” you said, pushing the post-it note towards him. “You’ve already got a meeting with Steve about the last quarter and those usually run on for over 2 hours,” you told him.

Bucky let out a heavy sigh, dropping his weight back into his chair. “God, what would I do without you, doll?” he asked dramatically.

“I don’t know, sir,” you chuckled, your attention turning back to the papers in front of you, pen pulled between your teeth.

“I can’t keep you here all night, doll. Go home,” Bucky urged after glancing at the clock, seeing it tick closer and closer to 2am.

“With all due respect, sir, I’d be going home to an empty apartment and a load of laundry to do whilst I wait for take out to arrive. This seems like a much better use of my time,” you told him sweetly.

Bucky looked at you skeptically, eyes squinting slightly before finally letting out another heavy sigh. “Whatever you say, love. And please, for the love of God, I’ve told you it’s Bucky or James,” he said with a soft smile. “Sir makes me feel ancient.”

“My apologies, Bucky.”

“I do like your idea of take out, though. Have you ever tried that 24 hour chinese place down the street? They do amazing chow mein!” he enthused, already reaching into his desk drawer to pull a menu out and thrust it in your direction.

“I haven’t, but I trust you not to give me food poisoning,” you chuckled, accepting the menu and opening it out over the clutter in front of you.

An hour later, you’d moved to the seating area in the corner of Bucky’s office, overlooking Brooklyn from 50 stories up. Your feet were pulled up on the couch next to you, shoes discarded by the desk what seemed like hours ago. “You were right,” you told Bucky, tapping your chopsticks together in the direction of the food you were eating.

You seemed to have broken him out of some sort of daze, earning a small jolt and a soft hum in reply. “About the food. Very nice,” you said softly.

“I know the best spots in Brooklyn for everything, doll,” Bucky grinned, voice effortlessly smooth even as it fast approached dawn and neither of you had slept since the previous morning.

“You might have to show me one day,” you grinned before your eyes widened. “Oh, god! I didn’t mean it like that! Not that I wouldn’t like that but- Oh, Jesus. I’m so sor-”

“It’s okay, doll,” Bucky chuckled, finally putting you out of your flustered misery. “I’d love to show you around,” he added, voice just as soft as the gentle blush rising over his ears. “If you’d want to, I mean.”

Before you even got a chance to reply, to accept his offer, his office phone started ringing. His eyes darted to the clock before he let out a long groan. “That’ll be Stevie in London. I swear he doesn’t realise that time zones are a real thing.”

You hid your giggle in your next mouthful of noodles as Bucky traipsed over to the desk. “Steven, it is 3am. If what you have to say isn’t life-alteringly urgent, I would like to get back to having chinese with my lovely assistant,” he quipped.

You couldn't hear what was being said, but if your knowledge of Steve and Bucky’s eye roll were anything to go off of, Steve was apologising for not realising that 8am in London meant 3am in Brooklyn and that he’d ring Bucky back at a better time. “It’s fine, Stevie. Just send me it all in an email and we can discuss it later on, yeah?”

As the two of you scraped the scraps out of your take-out tubs, Bucky looked to the clock again. “I’ll walk you out once we’re done here. And if I see you back in this office before noon, I will fire you,” he told you, already reaching to grab the plastic bag that the food came in.

“No you wouldn’t,” you scoffed, finishing your last mouthful before putting the box and chopsticks into the bag.

“And how do you know that?” Bucky asked, a flair of sass jerking over his eyebrow.

“You’d be lost without me, Barnes,” you smirked. You watched as he tried to formulate an argument, give you one example of how he’d functioned perfectly well without a single ounce of your help.

“You’ve got me there, doll,” he smiled lazily, tiredness seeming to seep into his facial features as he stood up to finish tidying the remnants of your supper away. “What can I say? I only surround myself with the best,” he smirked.

You and Bucky tidied your things away in silence, only speaking to let him know that you were returning your pile of papers to your desk. He met you out there, turning the key in the lock to his office door as you locked your desk drawers. “Come on, doll. I’ve kept you long enough.”

As you stood side by side waiting for the elevator, you turned to him slightly. “I’d love for you to show me around Brooklyn… If the offer’s there,” you told him nervously, pulling your lip between your teeth and gnawing at the skin.

You watched as Bucky blushed and fumbled over his words. “Unless the offer isn’t there…” you trailed off, mortified that you’d read the situation wrong and just taken your boss up on the offer of a date that was never even made.

“No, no! The offer’s definitely there,” Bucky rushed out, turning to you jerkily. “You’ve just gotta stop biting your lip, doll, I can’t focus at all on what I’m trying to say.”

The elevator opened in front of you and Bucky placed a hand on the small of your back, leading you into the carriage and following right behind you. As soon as the doors had slid shut, you looked up at him through your eyelashes.

“Make me, sir,” you goaded.

You watched as Bucky took a deep breath, nostrils flaring slightly. “You can’t go saying shit like that, doll. A guy might get the wrong idea,” he told you stiffly, fingers tightening into a fist by his side.

“I don’t think I’m giving anyone the wrong idea, sir,” you said, voice barely above a whisper even though it hung loud in the small carriage of the elevator. You risked a look at him, peeking out from under your eyelashes to see Bucky staring right back at you.

In an instant, you’d been crowded up against the side wall of the carriage, Bucky’s chest holding you in place. His flesh hand came and rested on your cheek, metal hand cupping your jaw. 

“Please,” you whispered when you saw him hesitate. “Bucky… James,” you pleaded.

His lips were soft against yours, smooth and firm and just right. The first moments of the kiss with him were the best kiss you’d ever had, and that was before he slipped an arm around your back to press you closer and raise you up on your toes. One of your hands slipped under his unbuttoned suit jacket, resting about his waist, and the other reached up to tease the hairs at his neck.

“God, doll, the things you do to me,” Bucky groaned, resting his forehead against yours. “Been wanting to do that since your interview,” he chuckled, reaching down to press a soft peck to your lips.

“Took you long enough,” you grinned, pulling your bottom lip in between your teeth again as you tried to hide your growing smile. Bucky’s gaze drifted down, to the tight line of your lip, and his eyes darkened ever so slightly.

“What did I tell you about that lip, missy.”

[archerdaryl]

Peppermint Sugar.

You’ve been tasked with decorating the Christmas cookies while Carol is out on a hunt. It would have gone just fine if the archer hadn’t shown up.  

Pairing: Daryl Dixon x Reader Tags: more cute christmas vibes, sfw, fluffy and fun but still a little slow burn Word Count: 2.5k  Notes: This one-shot follows on from London in Your Eyes! I’m thinking about turning it into a little collection of Christmas fics that all link together. As always I would love to hear your thoughts. ♥

You’d been at Carol’s house for barely ten minutes and you were already overwhelmed.

The air was thick and sweet like molasses, a pleasant surprise that was almost enough to soften the visual overload that was waiting for you in the kitchen. There were trays upon trays of cookies sitting on almost every counter space you could see. You had happily agreed to help decorate while she went out on a run with Ezekial and his knights, but good God.

There were at least a hundred cookies there. And they all needed expertly icing.

You approached the kitchen island slowly, eyebrows knitted together as you cursed under your breath. You can’t have been the only person she asked. Especially considering you weren’t exactly artistically inclined. Sure, a snowman was simple and you could probably figure out how to ice a Christmas tree adequately enough, but a couple of the shapes you couldn’t even identify.

“She’s lost her fucking mind.” The words escaped you in a mumble, followed by a long exhale.

Looking back you weren’t sure why you agreed to this in the first place. Maybe it was the assumption you wouldn’t be stuck here alone at 7am or that it would only be a few cookies you could hide at the bottom of the pile. You couldn’t have been more wrong, but you were at least relieved that you didn’t bother to change out of your yoga pants for the occasion considering you were going to be standing there decorating for hours.

Eventually you accepted that simply staring at the endless trays of cookies wasn’t actually going to do anything and you moved towards the stove to boil some water for coffee. While you waited for it to bubble, you organised the trays according to cookie shape and decided to start on what you could only assume were snowflakes.

How could you possibly mess those up? All you needed was white icing. If by some miracle Carol had got her hands on some food colouring, maybe you could be real fancy and mix a little blue in too.

You continued to wipe down the counters, dusting off remnants of flour before placing the first tray in front of you. You soon found a set of instructions left behind by Carol and you would be lying if you didn’t say you were relieved. You followed them, grabbing everything you needed and mixing up some sort of concoction that resembled a very basic icing.

Carol had to have chosen you for a reason. You hoped she had more faith in you than you did in yourself.

She had to, because you were already bored and you had barely begun.

And then the door swung open, almost making you jump.

“Oh my god, my very own knight in shining armour.”

Daryl Dixon stopped in his tracks and stared at you in confusion.

“Wha’?”

“I could settle for scrap metal.” You grumbled.

He narrowed his eyes before hesitantly moving his way through the house, eventually disappearing into the basement with Dog trailing along behind him. You mumbled a rather sarcastic goodbye before grabbing a ziplock bag and carefully spooning the icing into the bottom right corner, following Carol’s instructions as closely as possible.

“Thought you were huntin’ today.” Daryl shouted as he climbed back up the stairs.

“I was supposed to be. Carol wanted me to do… well, this.” You gestured to the mountain of cookies behind you and tried to hide your disdain. Dog happily padded towards you and demanded neck scratches by pushing his snout against your legs. Naturally, you obliged.

“On yer’ own?”

His crystalline gaze traced your form as he leaned onto the opposite side of the kitchen island. You were in an old hoodie, hardly form fitting but the dark red hue complimented your eyes, and there was a dusting of icing sugar across your cheek. He smiled ever so slightly, but said nothing.

“Unless you’re offering to keep me company, yeah, it looks like it.”

The pair of you hadn’t spent much time together since the Christmas fair. Keeping food stocks up was more important than ever with the snow being as heavy as it was, and the fact The King insisted on an extravagant Christmas celebration wasn’t helping anyone’s work load. Keeping busy kept you both from thinking about that stolen moment of innocent intimacy, though Daryl still found himself staring at you just a little bit longer with his fists clenched every time you crossed paths.

He was chasing the sensation of your hand in his without even knowing it.

“Ain’t got much else t’ do,” He lied, shrugging and leaning further onto the countertop with his forearms, “Watchin’ you fuck up might be fun.”

You didn’t bother glaring at him, your hands went straight for the icing sugar, picking it up in a pinch and flicking it right into his face before turning to find some scissors. You heard him splutter and blow hard, as if that alone could erase your act of vengeance.

“Don’ start somethin’ you can’t finish girl.”

You snorted and returned to your original position at the kitchen island, your grin widening after seeing the mess you made of him.

“I think you look great.” You insisted, “As ruggedly handsome as always.”

Daryl’s lips thinned in faux annoyance, though his eyes betrayed him. He was unable to come up with a retort of his own. He was stuck on two words in particular.

Ruggedly handsome.

He knew you were being sarcastic, you had a habit of that, but it still made him feel a little embarrassed. If not for the icing sugar speckled across his face, you likely would have noticed him blush a little.

“Handsome huh?”

Daryl had never been one to concern himself too much with the way he looked. He could never afford to and there certainly wasn’t any point anymore with the world in the state it was. However, in that moment he realised that when it came to you, he felt a sense of insecurity previously unknown to him.

“Oh yeah. I’m super into the whole dandruff thing.” You teased further, gesturing to the sugar speckled in his hair.

He rolled his eyes and pushed himself up off the island counter, “You talk too much.”

You had thrown him off on purpose. You had no choice. You couldn’t stand there and lie to him to protect yourself from the feelings you constantly tried to bury. Daryl Dixon was many things but ugly was not a word that ever came to mind. Yet, you couldn’t look him in the eye and tell him he looked like home either.

“C’mon. Carol will kill me if I don’t get something done.”

Daryl wasn’t sure what exactly it was he was supposed to be doing, but he was perfectly happy to be there even with the nerves causing havoc in his stomach. Anyone else would have considered them butterflies, but he wasn’t exactly a teenager dealing with a high school crush.

He met you behind the island and towered over you at your side. You forced yourself to concentrate on the task at hand, continuing to spoon icing into the ziploc bag. As he watched your hands at work, he leant down onto folded forearms and chewed the inside of his bottom lip absentmindedly

How did they look even softer than before?

He supposed it was because you were inside where it was warm, nuzzled within that oversized hoodie of yours. Was the rest of you as soft as your hands? He lost himself for a moment wondering what it would be like to fall asleep against your chest, your heartbeats perfectly in sync.

What the fuck was he thinking?

Quickly clearing his throat, he took his index finger and scooped up a blob of icing before you could steal it away with your spoon. He savoured the sweetness as he sucked it off his finger and then looked up at you with a mischievous glint in his eyes.

This was the most time they had spent together in days and he wasn’t about to ruin it by getting caught up in shit that didn't, no, couldn’t matter.

“Don’ start somethin’ you can’t finish girl.”

You met his gaze, eyes briefly drifting to his sugar sweet lips before you allowed a smirk to tug at the corners of your own.

“Don’t start something you can’t finish, Dixon.”

“Oh yeah?” He replied, cocking a brow before going in for a second scoop of icing.

Before you could even try to swat him away, Daryl had gotten his hands on the bowl and darted out of reach. Though his mischief may have been a distraction from his wandering thoughts, you were none the wiser. To you, this was one of those rare moments where he let his guard down enough to act a fool without wanting to beat himself up about it. You couldn’t be pissed even if you wanted to.

Grabbing the bag of powdered sugar, you immediately rushed after him, eager to make an even bigger mess than you already had. You followed him into the lounge where he had collapsed onto the couch, making himself comfortable and continuing to scoop out sticky white icing with his fingers.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” You whined, unable to keep an amused grin from tugging at the corners of your mouth, “Don’t think I won’t ruin this couch.”

Daryl looked up at you and allowed a snort of amusement to escape him. He didn’t doubt you for a minute, but he didn’t care about decorating no cookies and he knew you didn’t either so it wasn’t like he felt particularly guilty about the matter.

You stood your ground, your hand venturing into the bag of powdered sugar. Daryl watched you carefully and weighed up his choices, which didn’t take long at all because he soon found himself leaning forward to grab your forearm, pulling you down onto the couch with him in a poor attempt to keep you from attacking again.

What he didn’t consider was the bag of sugar doing a somersault out of your hands and creating  an even bigger mess anyway.

“Ah, shit!” He groused.

You landed awkwardly on him, having to adjust yourself so that you were flat on your back while he was laying on his side next to you with his arm bent to prop up his head. You quickly found yourselves coughing and having to wave your arms as you tried to dissipate the cloud of sugar, which mostly landed in a little hill on the rug but had still managed to leave heavy traces all over you.

“This,” You gestured to your hoodie and the mess around you, “- is on you.”

“Fuck that, I weren’t the one chasing me with sugar.”

After a futile attempt of wiping down your stomach with your hands, you turned your head to look at Daryl with a frown. You didn’t realise how close you were to each other until you met his eyes, which almost made you trip up on your words. You didn’t remember them being that blue.

“You’d really leave me to fend for myself like that?” You pouted.

Daryl opened his mouth to speak but the words got stuck in the back of his throat. You were so close. Too close. He could smell the sweetness on your skin, paired with peppermint which he could only assume was your toothpaste or some sort of lip balm.

“Carol won’t get mad at her pookie.”

He reached for the pillow by his legs but didn’t follow through on the threat as you quickly grabbed his arm and pulled it back towards you.

“I’m kidding!” You practically shrieked, his arm resting over your stomach with your fingers still wrapped around it to keep him from going for the pillow again, “Well, actually…”

“Stop.”

“It’s true and you know it. Please don’t leave me with this.”

Daryl went a little stiff. He wanted to pull away. He could feel the warmth of your body against his, could see each individual eyelash, and, fuck, those fingers of yours were wrapped around his arm. He was almost afraid to breathe. He didn’t want to take up more space than he already had.

You had spent many sleepless nights at each other’s sides in the past, either in temporary shelter while on a run or for comfort when things got bad. You had not, however, been this wrapped up in one another. Not in the slightest. He only had to put his head down for you to take him into your arms, and the thought of that alone was enough to make his heart skip a beat.

Once again, something had shifted and those uncharted waters were only getting deeper.

“Ya’ know, Dog can be pretty bad sometimes.”

“Yeah?”

Your eyes were locked and the words spilled from each of your lips slowly. Your grip on his forearm softened but you made no effort to let him go. In that moment it seemed as if you only saw each other and that the wall you insisted on keeping up was starting to crumble. It was only a matter of time before one of you rebuilt it, but right then, right in that moment, you could have laid there forever.

You wanted to know what he was thinking, if his thoughts were as scrambled as yours. You felt safe at Daryl's side, as if nothing could ever hurt you again, and you found yourself wanting him to pull you in closer.

God, he was already so close. One of you only had to lean in.

“Yeah. Carol don’t gotta know.”

“But the cookies…”

“Can’t ice no cookies without icin’.”

You couldn’t argue with that.

Daryl wet his bottom lip with his tongue and he could have sworn your eyes lowered to his mouth for just a second. He wanted to be put out of his misery. He felt like a damn school girl losing his head over someone he couldn’t have. You hadn’t approached this - whatever this is - for a reason but he wasn’t feeling very reasonable anymore.

Did your mouth taste as sweet as his? Would the peppermint make his lips tingle?

All he had to do was lean in.

Then, the unmistakable sound of the front door being opened echoed throughout the house. You both froze and confusion turned to horror when Carol eventually called out to you, claiming the weather had taken a turn for the worst.

You sat up on your elbows, eyebrows knitted together in worry whilst Daryl went completely silent, both annoyed and embarrassed that Carol had trespassed in her own home. You were mortified, there wasn’t a damn thing to show for your time there other than icing sugar everywhere, but you were also a little relieved - not because you didn’t want to be pinned in place next to him, but because you were finally able to take a full breath.

“Quick.” Daryl muttered, “Out the back.”

“But -”

Daryl didn’t give you a chance to argue. He quickly but carefully climbed up off of the couch and grabbed your hand without hesitation, squeezing it tight and pulling you along towards the back of the house where you could both escape.

You squeezed back, a childish grin growing across your sugar dusted face as your hand fit perfectly into his once more.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Gaby was exhilarated to remodel this London townhouse that hadn’t been touched for 60 yrs.  "I spotted these graphic cement tiles and knew they were perfect for the front hall," Gaby says. "When we laid the tiles, though, they were a few inches short. I found a piece of wood in my scrap collection in the garden and we added it as trim."

She’s a very visual person. The large-scale black-and-white photograph in the hall is made up of six felt panels by Brooklyn artist Lorna Simpson.

The wood floor was purchased before the renovation started and left to dry for a year, b/c she finds an uneven surface appealing.

When she moved in, the kitchen had a pink wall. Rather than paint over it, she proceeded to match the pink and use it around the room. She liked the texture of some of the existing panels so much that she left them unpainted.

She found the yellow midcentury table and moved it into the pink room. She wasn't concerned about their matching, she knew she could make it work.

When her three boys were younger, the baker's trays held their sports equipment.

Gaby purchased the folk art "Fresh Eggs" panels many years ago when she lived in LA. Sitting on an airplane and looking out the window, she was inspired by the metal rivets of the plane's wing and worked with a metal fabricator to create the same effect on her kitchen cabinets.

She opened up a wall and installed a pine wine rack as a room divider-  The original idea was to fill the wine rack with empty green bottles and let the light flow through.

The pantry holds Gaby’s plate collection from South Africa. The plates are her everyday china.

She opened the back wall out to the garden and inserted metal doors with yellow glass panes.

The neon sign is a birthday present from her three sons. "She's a Mimimins (their nickname for their mother)," and hangs above a portrait of Picasso.

The dogs snooze in front of a painting by an artist friend.

A series of drawings of the New York World’s Fair sets the tone in the bedroom.

A garage roller shutter is used to panel the hallway leading to one of her son's rooms. A shower is located on the other side of the bookcase, which is comprised of old bread boards.

The Americana memories she has are from visiting her best friend in Wyoming when they were young. They have always stayed with her.

Gaby created the tile pattern on her terrace based on a Frank Lloyd Wright tapestry she saw several years ago at the Guggenheim Museum. She wanted to create a pattern that looked like it was there forever.

https://www.remodelista.com/

[danielpscrapdealer]

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[feigeroman]

Thomas Headcanons: ‘Arry & Bert

Both ‘Arry and Bert were built in 1955, although by which workshops is not known. In any case, they were both initially based at a marshalling yard in East London - possibly Hither Green, going by their accents. However, they only worked there for a few years. In 1960, BR sent both of them to the Barrow-In-Furness area, in answer to a request by Barrow Ironworks Ltd for shunters to help their own engines with an extra workload.

In early 1962, both ‘Arry and Bert were transferred again, this time across the channel to the neighbouring Vicarstown Steelworks, in response to a similar call for help. They had little contact with the NWR engines at this stage, although it is known that they had a brief altercation with Stepney when he arrived on his initial visit to Sodor.

This explains 'Arry’s line, “Got you this time, Stepney!“ in Stepney Gets Lost, implying Stepney had previous met the diesels on at least one occasion.

Despite having been on Sodor for a good decade or so, it wasn’t until 1973 that the diesels were officially purchased by the NWR, in a joint agreement between the railway and the Steelworks. It is theorised that this arrangement was made so that Sir Topham Hatt would be able to keep tabs on how ‘Arry and Bert interacted with the rest of his engines. The fact that the sale was made shortly after their infamous second attempt on Stepney’s life seems to lend credence to this theory.

Like most of the engines jointly owned by the NWR and other private concerns, the exact nature of the arrangement is a little dubious, It seems, though, that the NWR owns the diesels outright, and simply leases them back to the Steelworks.

It was only at this point that both ‘Arry and Bert were repainted into the Steelworks’ corporate livery, and also gained their names for the first time. They were named respectively after Harrison & Hubert Beames, the twin brothers who originally founded the Vicarstown Steelworks. Obviously the full names never stuck...

An H-beam is a type of steel beam (geddit?).

‘Arry and Bert have both mainly worked at the Steelworks ever since, although being owned by the NWR, they are still frequently sent to help out elsewhere. This includes numerous stints as shunters at Anopha Quarry and Tidmouth Docks over the years, a few weeks each at various smaller yards, a few attempts at working proper trains, and even a brief spell as station pilots at Vicarstown station!

The diesels also serve as Diesel Ten′s current minions, following his arrival in late-1973. Although they themselves aren’t that competent at following his orders, they’re still a damn sight better than Splatter & Dodge, whose idiocy was great enough that Diesel Ten was often better off doing the dirty work himself!

In my headcanon, by the way, Splatter & Dodge were two other engines owned by the same government department who oversaw many of Diesel Ten’s modifications. They reportedly visited Sodor once, so they must have also been involved with Diesel Ten’s transfer there.

While it’s true that the two pairs of diesels have never been seen in the same place together, it should be stressed that they are in fact two separate pairs, and not one pair disguised as the other.

While it would be fair to say that Diesel Ten rules over the Steelworks with an iron fist (literally), he does frequently leave ‘Arry and Bert in charge while he goes out to deliver finished iron and steel, or collect scrap metal. On some rare occasions, he even lets them go out and do this, while he looks after the shunting - usually when he needs a moment’s peace and can’t be bothered going out!

To a lesser extent, the twins also sometimes serve as Devious Diesel’s minions - heavies would be a more accurate term. In other words, Diesel usually does the thinking, while they do the actual work.

[dorthyanndrarry]

The Liars Department -9-

tags: drarry, auror Harry, ministry employee Draco, oblivious Harry, Draco is an unrepentant flirt, and disillusionment there’s just so much disillusionment

sugessted rating: T+

Part 1 (contains links to all parts) <– Part 8 || Part 10 -->

-

Harry returned after noon, the transfer taking far too long, as they always did, and then the Junior insisting they stop off for lunch while they were outside.

The lunch itself had been nice enough, but there had been enough awkward silence to drown a moose in. Once a Junior ran out of hero worship to gush at Harry with, they often didn’t have any real conversation left in them. It was almost like they had trouble talking to him as if he were a real person, like they couldn’t relate to him. And Harry didn’t have the social skills to make up the difference.

He let the Junior finish the paperwork, and went back to his cubicle, resting his forehead on the desk for just a second.

“Went that well, huh?” Ron said.

Harry leaned back in his chair. Ron’s desk was still covered in ledgers and pages of maths, “You look like you’re having fun.”

“Can be. Sometimes,” Ron said, “It’s weird. At school, I always felt a bit dull, but here I feel pretty clever.”

"Hermione's so smart everyone looks stupid in comparison," Harry said, "And you've always been good at chess, and being a good keeper requires a lot of thinking ahead very quickly."

Ron cuffed him on the arm, “Trying to butter me up, are you? Well, it worked. What do you want?”

“To distract me before I have to go report to Shunter again,” Harry said.

Ron grinned, “Easy enough. Jack- he’s a Junior, since you never remember their names, we all call him Jack’willin because he does whatever anyone asks him to- He’s only been out of training a few months and just a few hours ago he exploded all the papers on his desk.”

“What? How? Was he secretly brewing something?” Harry asked.

Ron shook his head, “Nah. Robard sent him to the medi-witch, and Sally heard from Leon who heard from Mallaidh that the medi-witch diagnosed him with a metal-breakdown.”

“And that caused the explosion?” Harry asked.

"Magic's funny like that, it builds up and explodes for all sorts of reasons," Ron said, "All I know for sure was that he was muttering about 'bloody paperwork' all the way to the lift. Took an hour to collect all the scraps of paper and spell them back together."

"That's pretty exciting," Harry asked.

"And a muggle exposure just happened, some kid did accidental magic," Ron said, "But that's it really."

"Muggle exposure?" Harry asked.

“Yeah?”

“So they called the Obliviators?”

Ron frowned at him, “Yeah, or the Liars Department, I guess. Why?”

Harry didn't answer, already on his feet and hurrying to the duty roster hanging on the wall.

Like Mrs Weasley's family clock, the duty roster showed where everyone in the department was, except instead of a clock it was a chalkboard. The first row was if an auror was on duty or not, not on duty aurors showed no other information, there had been a big lawsuit about it ages ago. The second row showed auror location, most of them were at the office, but there were two at a park in north London.

Harry jotted the address down and headed to the apparition zone.

-

-

Harry stepped out of the little copse of trees that had been designated for apparition and hurried for the playground a little way away. Malfoy was standing in the centre like a small beacon of light, the kind that blinded you and made you run into street lights.  As he got close, Harry could see that Malfoy was wearing his sunglasses and a scowl beneath them with his arms crossed over his chest. Harry walked even faster. He had been right to come, things weren't going well.

“You honestly expect us to believe,” the first Auror said, “that there’s a department called, ‘the liar’s department? Do I look stupid?”

Malfoy raised an eyebrow, “Obviously.”

The second Auror shifted her weight uneasily, “I should go back and check with Leopold, he’s the Senior-”

“We should arrest him and take him back to the Ministry and send the Obliviators back here,” the first Auror said.

Harry was close enough to recognise them as the Juniors he had worked with yesterday and close enough that Malfoy saw him approaching over their shoulders.

Malfoy’s mouth twitched, and he lifted his sunglasses up on top of his head, “Auror Potter.”

The Juniors startled and spun around their eyes wide.

“Mr Harry Potter, sir!” The- Harry had seen her name on the roster right before he came, it was… Kalya, he was pretty sure.

“It’s Auror Potter,” Harry said and shot Malfoy a glare which didn’t stop his smug grin.

“A-Auror Potter,” Kalya said nervously.

The first Junior, a rather bland looking bloke who might have been named… Jake? Jack? Jacob? Might’ve been Jacob, was looking like he might have a go at passing out.

Harry would deal with that if it happened “Juniors are not supposed to close out a scene without assistance from a senior auror,” he told them.

Jacob wobbled.

“Um-uh-um,” Kalya stammered.

“Calm down. It’s not as if you assigned yourselves here, did you?”

Kalya quickly shook her head.

“Right,” Harry said, “Let’s get this cleaned up before too much time passes. People tend to get nervous when they lose too much time.”

“R-right!” Kalya said and then immediately looked utterly at a loss again.

Jacob hadn’t moved, he was dreadfully pale.

“Give the- Give Malfoy a rundown of what transpired,” Harry told her.

Kalya spun around.

Malfoy was grinning, looking much more relaxed.

“Penelope Springwater, age six, was playing with muggle friends at approximately-”

“I don’t need the novel, just the synopsis from the back of the book,” Malfoy interrupted.

Kalya hesitated, “Um, she picked up a stick and accidentally shot sparks from it… it was elm, I think.”

They all looked over at the young father nervously holding on the shoulders of his daughter, he looked exhausted. The eponymous Penelope was kicking a groove through the grass and into dirt underneath, bored out of her mind but adequately determined to express her displeasure at having to stand still for what must have felt like an eternity.

“Is that all?” Malfoy said in dismay, “We could have been done ages ago.”

Harry tried not to glance around. There were at least a dozen muggles frozen in time around them, even the oblivators would take a half an hour with so many.

“Um...” Kalya said.

“Do you still have the stick?” Malfoy asked Penelope.

Penelope looked up from her digging and pointed to a broken branch right by their feet.

Malfoy snatched it up, “Transfigure this into a sparkler, would you?”

“A what?” Jacob said, finally coming to.

“I’m…not that good at transfiguration,” Kalya said.

Malfoy turned to Harry.

Harry drew his wand and did his best to make McGonagall proud, transfiguring the stick into a sparkler. It might have been a little too big, but fine detail had never been his strong suit.

“Truly a hero of the people,” Malfoy said.

Harry scowled at him.

Malfoy gave him a cheeky wink and motioned for the father and daughter to come over, “Take this,” he gave Penelope the sparkler, “make sure you only hold onto the bottom here.”

“Why?” Penelope asked petulantly.

“Because the rest will be on fire,” Malfoy said.

Penelope cheered up at that.

“Wait, you’re- On fire? You can’t give my daughter that!” the father said with growing alarm.

Malfoy rolled his eyes, “Muggle children manage to hold sparklers all the time without spontaneously combusting.”

“What if something goes wrong!” The father said.

“Then she will have learned an important lesson and will be more careful next time,” Malfoy said.

Harry stepped in front of Malfoy, “Ignore him, sir-”

The father was starting to look red in the face, “You of all people can’t allow this- this criminal to-”

“Sir,” Harry interrupted him firmly, “You and Penelope will go to your locations at the time of the event when all the muggles were frozen. The sparkler will be lit, the spells will all be lifted, and then you can run over and take the sparkler away from your daughter.”

Penelope huffed and kicked hard at the dirt.

“It will only be a moment,” Harry reassured him, “We can- We can put a fireproofing charm over Penelope so she’ll be perfectly fine. Do you understand and accept this scenario?”

“And what am I supposed to say? A- A firework just appeared out of nowhere?” the father said.

“You could say a stranger must have given it to her, which is nearly true, or she found it on the ground,” Malfoy said, “Better to say nothing and just complain about how dangerous they are. Don’t encourage anyone to think, people aren’t good at it and it will only cause trouble.”

The father looked ready to start another tirade, but Harry quickly sent him back to the bench he had been sitting on during the incident, Penelope went in front of the swings, three other kids were frozen around her, all holding sticks like swords.

“Go wait by the trees,” Harry told the Juniors, “I’ll light this and as soon as I reach you, release the spells.”

Kalya and Jacob nodded, jogging off to the treeline. Malfoy lingered.

“What? Go join them,” Harry said.

Malfoy leaned close, his soft words tickling Harry’s ear, “You’re still wearing your auror’s uniform.”

A shiver went down Harry’s spine as he quickly covered his ear, scowling at Malfoy, “fuck off.”

“Now now, no swearing in front of the children,” Malfoy said with a grin.

Harry swatted at him, missing as Malfoy stepped back out of the way and casually walked across the playground to join the Juniors.

Harry drew his wand from his sleeve, quickly tapping it on his badge to change his uniforms appearance.

“You ready?” Harry asked.

Penelope nodded, looking determined.

Harry put a charm over her to make her fireproof for about an hour. He then lit the end of the sparkler with a whispered incendio and legged it.

Kalya and Jacob quickly dispelled the charms around the playground once Harry was close.

“Penelope! Where did you get that!” Penelope’s father said, rather unconvincingly.

Harry turned around just in time to see Penelope take off running in the opposite direction, sparkler held high above her head with a scream of delight and defiance.

“Penelope!!” her father yelled, very convincingly, running faster to catch up with her. “Come back here!”

“Nooooooo!” Penelope swerved, ducking under a slide and through the swings as the other children started chasing after in a parade of pure chaos

“That’s dangerous!!” Penelope’s father said, sounding a bit winded.

“Fuck Off!” Penelope shouted to the sky and then laughed hysterically.

Harry winced.

Malfoy laughed so hard he nearly fell over. He grabbed Harry’s shoulder to stay up and Harry couldn’t bring himself to shake Malfoy off.

“Sir?” Kalya asked quietly.

Harry stared in dismay at the playground. Some other parents had joined the chase, mostly to try and pull their own children from the chase. Penelope didn’t seem to be slowing down in the slightest. “You can finish the report and turn it in. I’ll make sure Malfoy’s form gets to Auror Leopold before the end of the day.”

“O-Okay. If you’re sure,” Kalya said.

“I am,” Harry added, “Just between you and me, Leopold likes to cut corners, and when he does, he’s not the one that gets in trouble. Read up on the rules and watch out for yourself. If you tell- if you remind Auror Leopold of regulation and he refuses to comply, take it to Robards or Shunter.”

“Okay, I will,” Kalya said and then, as Jacob hurried into the trees, added, “Thanks.”

Harry nodded.

Penelope’s sparkler had finally burned out, and she stopped running, panting but happy as she raised it into the air, shouting at the top of her lungs, “I’m the greatest witch queen in the whole world!!!”

Harry groaned, desperately hoping her father wouldn’t submit a complaint or he’d never hear the end of it.-

♥ Next update will be tuesday noonish pst ♥ might only be one update a week for a little while

♥  Tags below  ♥  (I don’t have a permanent tags list. All tags are of the wonderful people who left messages on the previous part.)

♥ @potter-harreh ♥ ♥ ♥ thank you so much ♥ ♥ ♥

♥ @contemporarydiva  ♥ i don’t really have anyone to talk about things so my feelings tend to slip into my writing instead ♥ i try to be careful about it ♥ thank you

♥ @myrvaenboys thank you!!!! ♥

♥ @magvic thank u! ♥

♥ @pumpkinminette yess!! thank you! things are improving

♥ @lilyinthebreeze thankyouuuuu!!! ♥

♥ @dewitty1 my life is slowly calming down which is still good but I can’t stop myself being worried about the protesters, I just want them all to be safe and for all the c*ps to fall over dead, I can only hope ♥ thank you!!!!!! ♥

♥ @shadowybook harry’s entirely unaware of his own obsessive interest in draco, he’s just helping hermione, thats all, just...helping hermione ♥ thank you so much!!!!!!!! ♥

@witch19 harry’s got no patience for stupid horrid authority figures ♥ thank you ♥

♥ @idareyoutotakealook  I’m glad, i don’t feel like I know what I’m doing but i’m happy ♥ ♥ thank you ♥

♥ @devilrising thank you so much!!! i was originally going to make the aurors for typical and boring but now they’re going to be mildly incompetent and mostly useless except ron, ron’s great ♥

♥ @livredor71 thank you!!!!!! ♥

♥ @bughug1999 thank you! ♥

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[weirwoodking]

Wait Sansa and Arya BOTH wanting to become war nurses👀👀 I can only see Sansa be the correct age around 1942, uh maybe she can meet Harry the Heir there too and the other Vale girls

Okay so if we’re thinking about Robb and Jon being drafted at 18 in 1940, that would make them born in 1922, Sansa born in 1925, Arya born in 1927, Bran born in 1929, and Rickon born in 1933. (Theon born in 1917.) So... Sansa and Arya would be 15 and 13 respectively in 1940. I’m imagining that Ned is Scottish and Catelyn is English and they moved to London early in their marriage. I could see Sansa working/volunteering at a hospital in London for injured soldiers (the Vale girls are other nurses), and Arya being a scrap metal collecting kid. Arya would definitely be upset that she couldn’t go off and fight with her brothers. Perhaps Sansa sees being a solider as noble, heroic thing, but she meets Sandor in the hospital and her view of war as being something full of glory is broken a bit. And then when Ned and Robb die she no longer thinks of it as something noble at all, only horrific.