A/N: It's been too long, guys. My last one-shot was all the way back in March and we're pushing July now! I do have an excuse – I was working on a long multi-chaptered fic – but still. I've missed writing one-shots. My lazy muse has been on overdrive lately trying to hold something as involved as a plot together. She's happy to come back to something she knows.
I dunno where this came to me. I was in the car, coming back from the mall with my mom…then it hit me. So I got home, plopped down on my laptop chair, put on Boys Like Girls, avoided my family like the plague and just wrote.
I hope you guys like this, though.
Cheers.
Xx
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Announcement
By: Zayz
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She decides to let the news slip while they are washing dishes.
For some unfathomable reason or another, Lily has always refused to wash dishes by magic. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that she is a Muggleborn who has grown up washing dishes by hand with her mother, but she has stoutly refused to do this particular chore the easy way for about as long as she can remember.
When she began living with James, the habit had certainly alienated him a bit, but he has become somewhat accustomed to it, and he frequently joins her in the evening, standing in their cheerful blue kitchen, washing dishes. They always leave one of Lily's Beatles albums on the record player to play in the background and Lily hums along, washing each item in the sink before handing it off to James to dry.
This is their bonding time, when they begin swapping stories that will carry them through dinner; and Lily knows instinctively that this relaxed evening ritual is the optimal opportunity to get her news off her chest.
So tonight, a snowy night in December, when James puts on the music and tells her what idiotic thing Sirius did earlier, Lily clears her throat in that way she has, passes him a plate to keep him busy, and mentions, "Hey, I want to run something by you."
"Sure," says James agreeably, accepting the plate and running a washcloth over it. "What's going on?"
She pauses, but forces herself to continue, washing out a glass with particular vigor. "Do you remember Sirius's birthday last month?" she asks, meaningfully off-hand.
"Of course I do," says James, grinning. "Dinner, whiskey, dancing…we had a blast."
"And then we came home and collapsed on the couch."
James's grin is rather impish as he dries the inside of a glass. "That we did. I think we acquainted with the floor, too."
Lily smirks. "Yeah."
"Right, so what about it?" His eyes are so innocent as they behold her, curiosity piqued on the surface of his tell-all irises.
"Well…that night, we did more than make friends with our floor," says Lily, her tone casually deliberate.
A furrowed crease appears between his eyes. "What do you…?"
"I had a doctor's appointment today," Lily says determinedly. "Just a check-up, nothing major. While I was there, I asked them to give me a test and they said…"
"No! Y-You can't…you can't be…" blathers James, uncertainty and alarm rippling across his open face.
"It was purely for my own knowledge," she continues, averting her eyes back to the plate in her hands, which is still under the steady stream of water from the faucet. She's been washing this same dish since she began on this topic. "I had been a little ill in the morning, and I've had to go to the bathroom quite a lot, and I've been craving pineapple for some reason…so I asked my doctor…"
"Lils…" Those innocent eyes are now full of blind panic. "Lils, don't tell me…"
"James Potter, I am officially one month pregnant with our child," Lily declares, her eyes catching his only at this point. "I'm due in July and you, you are going to be a father."
Besides the music floating merrily through the air, the couple is completely and utterly silent. James blinks several times, frozen, and then promptly drops the glass he had been holding. It falls to the floor, shattering with a single shriek of separating glass, and the fragments lay splintered at their feet.
Lily glances down at the ground and then at her husband, wondering which mess to clean up first. She decides on the glass – she extracts her wand from her pocket and quickly disposes of the pieces in the trash before she looks back tentatively at James, tucking her hair behind her ear like she does when she's nervous.
He is still standing in front of her in complete, dumbfounded shock. To be frank, she doesn't blame him. She did exactly the same thing when her doctor kindly informed her of the news earlier in the afternoon.
"Look," she says, her hand gently stroking his hair, "I know it's scary. I don't know the first thing about being a mother. But it's going to be okay. We'll learn. We have about eight months; we can buy books; we'll figure this out; we'll be all right—"
"Merlin, Lily, we're going to be parents," James interrupts, wondrous, as though the epiphany has only just hit him. "You and me. We're going to have a baby."
"I'll be doing the getting fat part, as well as the delivery part," Lily reminds him, "but yes. We're going to have a baby."
James looks to Lily's stomach, currently and temporarily flat, and regards it with the same sort of incredulous wonder that guided his speech. Gingerly, he reaches his hand out and touches it ever so lightly, and he looks back at Lily. Her expression is expectant.
"You've got a little person in there," he says. "Our little person."
She smiles. "I know. And now you know too."
James blinks a couple more times, though the stunned, hit-in-the-face-with-a-cannonball quality has not yet left his features. "It's…it's incredible," he says. "We're going to be parents, Lily!"
Both of them break into nervous chuckles, the world taking on quite a surreal quality, and then Lily yanks James into a tight embrace. He is taller than she, so he almost topples them both to the floor with his surprise, but they hold their balance and he squeezes her snugly, the smell of her sweet watermelon shampoo pervading into his nostrils.
As the two cuddle in their blue kitchen, dirty dishes long forgotten, the December snow falls, the bitter winter winds blowing it haphazardly around Godric's Hollow; and as Lily's eyes wander to the window from over James's shoulder, she realizes in that abrupt, chance way she has, that the song playing in the background is "P.S. I Love You."
Huh, she muses as she kisses James's cheek and unwillingly drifts back to the dishes on the counter with him. Cool.
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A/N: So there you go. An adorable little one-shot, written in the course of about an hour. Scantily edited and slapped up online, as a good majority of my one-shots are.
Review button is down there. How can you ignore its beseeching stare? Go on, click it. Type me something. I know you want to.
–Zay