It takes him three tries to make it out the front door without her seeing that, no, he didn’t change his pants, and it is the one instance wherein that word works in his favor.
He does half the things he does because he is very tired of people saying he is not allowed to do them. When he should be allowed to do them, since these elastic pants are comfortable, and he’s wearing his socks pulled up so that you can hardly even tell he’s wearing lady trousers. No one gives him any funny looks either, because he’s bundled up in this big, ugly sweater that covers up the elastic parts anyway. No, this is not necessarily the kind of thing he should be wearing tonight, since he is waiting for a signal, and no, the signal will have not one mention of him being invited to a place where pregnancy clothes are acceptable. Lily was on bed rest, Alice was on bed rest. They were all on strict orders to keep the ones carrying The Future out of this mess that they were creating. Just like that; The Future had their own special title because They Were The Generation To Carry On This Generation’s Name and The Future was a very special thing indeed. Twenty years from now the muggles will have finally learned how to make their automobiles float around in the air, and everyone, magic or otherwise, will be traveling around in things that looked like fallopian tubes to get to their final destination (e.g. the Jetsons who James liked to model his life after, though the premise of the show that Lily sometimes fell asleep to still confused him, like, why they flew their automobiles when brooms were so much more convenient?)
Upon arriving at the entrance to Godric’s Hollow, he turns quickly on the spot, undershoots where he was supposed to be landing, and ends up five blocks away from Marlene’s flat. He had begged to come over because of reasons, like Lily being hormonal and bloated, though really it was just because he had contemplated holding his breath until he passed out (he was bored, it usually served to keep him from being bored because he was, as it were, unconscious) but Lily got angry at him the last time he did it—resulting in another ‘no’ and James wanting to do it just to spite her. He was doing the smart thing this time by simply gate crashing on Macky’s life. A better alternative, because he could just sit around with his pooched belly hanging over the side of his pants on her couch moaning about how life sucks and why do I exist again because I haven’t actually figured that out yet.
James stops at a little flower shop sitting on the corner of the street before Marlene’s, and contemplates the vaguely O’Keefian poppies that have always made him laugh due to their—for lack of better word—uncanny resemblance to vaginas. He bought a dozen and a half of the vaginae, shoved them under his arm, made a pit stop at the delicatessen shop across the street and when he finally makes it to her house, he is laden with drooping flowers and brown bags filled with breads and jams because Lily had been telling him no, he could not keep that much bread in the house, she would eat it all and when she finally dropped the seven pound succubus, she would weigh five hundred pounds and he’d leave her for someone thin and perfect, like she used to be. Or, she didn’t actually say that, but it is what he heard when she was loading baguettes into the bin. At first he tries just walking in, like he always does, but the door is locked, and his wand is stuck into his back pocket (James does not fear losing his left buttock) and he just rests his head against a loaf of cibatta until she comes and lets him in. She’s laughing when she does it, and he can’t make himself smile since he doesn’t know the punchline.
“It looks like you’ve eaten your entire existence,” he says, laying out the bread and spreads and poppies on the nearest flat surface. “Even the little dust bunnies that used to linger by your telly.”
Then he hitches up the maternity pants like this is the most normal thing in the world.
