Jily oneshots

Paint Fumes and Beans

done by elanev91 on fanfiction.net

James Potter was losing touch with reality.

Really, he was absolutely losing his sanity.

Lily was having a baby, a baby, and he was absolutely unhinged.

He wasn't neurotic for all the reasons you might expect. He wasn't terrified of becoming a father (if anything, he was excited, stupidly excited, over the top, can barely breathe because of it excited), he wasn't plotting ways to fake his own death and change his name and avoid responsibility — no, James Potter was losing his grip on reality because the baby, their baby, was coming right fucking now and nothing, nothing, was ready.

They'd only moved into this house a year ago, this little cottage overlooking the sea where they'd thought it would be perfect to eventually raise a family. They thought they'd had all the time in the world — all the time to get the walls painted and the floors refinished and the house looking just the way they wanted it to — but then eventually became next fucking year and James didn't know what to do with himself.

They found out that Lily was pregnant early one bitterly cold December morning. James went to the shop that very day and rented a floor sander and stain and varnish and spent the next two weeks refinishing every floor in the house.

Lily had been — mostly — tolerant of James and his home improvement schemes at the beginning. She was mildly annoyed with him when whole swathes of the house were out of bounds while he stained and painted and hung new wainscoting, was a bit more than annoyed about the fact that they had to open all their windows in the middle of winter so they didn't suffocate from the fumes. She got used to coming home from work and finding James in one chaotic state or another — sometimes the house echoed with the rhythmic bursts of James' nail gun as he hung new moulding in every room of the house, other times Lily was opening another goddamn window because James was repainting the lounge because 'We used this eggshell, but it's too shiny and we wanted a matte finish and I know it's going to be harder to clean once the baby gets here, but, look, I have all this extra paint and we can just touch it up!'

Sometimes he caught her looking at him like she was reminding herself that she loved him and then he backed off for a while.

Until he remembered how drafty the windows were in the room they were planning to convert into the nursery and he spent the entire day measuring and cutting up the 'most high quality silicon weather stripping they sell at B&Q' so that the baby wouldn't freeze to death in the wintertime because 'Lil, you know we get that icy wind off the ocean in the winter sometimes'.

Lily was quick to point out that they rarely, if ever, got icy wind off the ocean, but she was grateful that he'd taken the time to fix the windows all the same.

It just didn't make sense to him that Lily wasn't going absolutely mad with worry. Maybe she was — she was always the better of the two of them at keeping a cool head under pressure — but James knew her better than he knew himself and she didn't really seem that nervous.

Sure, they sometimes talked about what would happen after — what raising a baby would be like, especially with the world being what it was, if giving birth would be as wretched as she always imagined it would be — but whenever James brought up the absolute disaster area that was their house, Lily always just laughed him off.

'James, the house is perfect.'

They were lying in bed late in Lily's second trimester. James was fretting, again, about paint, and Lily was trying to be a good sport (really, he could tell, she was putting in a lot of effort, and he was trying not to talk about it but he really couldn't help it) but James knew that she was starting to get a bit exasperated with him.