Who: Maggie and Braith
What: Uh ohz.
Where: Braith's flat
When: MOMENTS AGO.

It was hard to be pouty and miserable when the father of your child was actually very nice and sweet. Maggie frowned across the living room as Braith prepared their dinner, and dug the heels of her swollen feet deeper into the foot rest. It was frustrating, because she was good at being annoyed and irrationally angry, but Braith was good at just being---nice! And kind! And sometimes mysterious, but Maggie didn’t exactly let him on all of her secrets either. Her father told her to be nice to the man, while her mother had hinted that they could always pay him off, if Maggie never wanted to speak to him again.

She stared hard at the back of his head. He was her boyfriend, she supposed. They hadn’t been very affectionate as of late, whether it be because of her giant stomach or the just plain awkwardness of the entire situation, she couldn’t be sure, but she figured that if Braith was truly concerned about it, the he would have said something.

Maggie let out a breath and dropped her feet to the floor in a poor attempt to push herself up. Why was she so huge, when she had nearly two months to go? Odette hadn’t gotten this big, was it because she was so short?

“Little help!” she squeaked, teetering on one hand pressing into the arm of the chair.

Braith too was a little concerned about how large she’d gotten as of late. He hadn’t been affectionate because -- well, honestly, his job had gotten a bit too serious for him in the past few weeks. Voldemort was taking a hard stance on the Order, he wanted to crush them and ... Braith supposed he couldn’t blame him for that mindset.

Still. He was getting to be a senior member and he’d had to help kill some innocent man. They’d started killing children. It shouldn’t have bothered him because they were ‘inferior-blooded’ or supporters, but he’d never been particularly enthusiastic about being a Death Eater. It was familial duty that had driven him to join, not any desire to harm people.

“Coming,” he murmured quietly, sliding out of the kitchen and hurriedly going to grasp Maggie’s hands. “Come on, then. Up you go. Dinner’s nearly done anyway.”

“Sorry,” she muttered, flushing from embarrassment. Tiny people should not be allowed to grow so big, it threw off their entire equilibrium and made them sitting ducks when it came to unbalanced situations. Maggie nodded her head in thanks and latched onto Braith’s hand; it wasn’t terribly uncomfortable to hold his hand, she had slept with the man and was now currently carrying his child. She should probably try and be more like a doting mother than what she’d been doing for the past seven or so months, but it was hard when everything, including every last hormone in your body, was out of whack.

“It smells really good,” Maggie let out. One thing she had enjoyed about pregnancy was allowing herself to get off of the strict diet regiments being a professional quidditch player forced you to be on. She scoffed at Odette when she’d tried to get her to join her exercise routines and all that nonsense---if she was allowed to mope around and sit on her arse all day for nine months, she was going to take great advantage of that.

Maggie managed to slip onto a stool at Braith’s counter, “I’ll take on dinner for tomorrow, how about that?” she said, reaching for the utensils. The slight popping of apparation outside the door of the flat went unnoticed by her, but the heavy knock on the door nearly made her slip off the stool.

Braith had been paranoid since the debacle that had ended up being Mr. Potter’s death. He’d been even more skittish than usual, and every noise that was let out around him had him on edge. It was for that reason and that reason only that he heard the popping before the knock on the door.

He froze, hands half-poised to serve out Maggie’s food. He didn’t respond to her question, didn’t do anything of the sort. If he’d been a braver man, perhaps he would have told her something like ‘get to the bedroom now and don’t come out until you’re sure it’s safe’, but he wasn’t.

Hell, if he’d been a better Death Eater, this situation probably wouldn’t have come up at all. He clenched his jaw tight and tried to will himself to move before --

--too late. A stunning spell hit him square in the chest, knocking him back against the nearest wall. The aurors around him were shouting for him to remain where he was, to not move. He wasn’t sure what they were doing with Maggie - he couldn’t see what they were doing with her - but he doubted they were being overly gentle unless one of them had the smarts to notice she was extremely pregnant.

He let out a hard breath of air, feeling dizzy from the spell.

Well, this was going to be something to explain ... if he got the chance to.

It all happened too fast! It was going too fast for her to understand! Maggie heard the noises and saw the spells, but she did not know what was going on. Who was pulling her off the chair, they’d nearly flung her across the flat! She stumbled greatly, but thankfully dropped onto the couch, and from her new, completely frazzled position, Maggie was able to count the nearly dozen heads of the aurors that had burst into the flat.

And that’s when the shrieking started (or had she been in too much shock to notice she had been screaming the entire time?).

“What are you doing?!” Maggie screamed, somehow finding the strength to push herself up from the couch. Merlin, she hadn’t been able to do that in weeks, where was this adrenaline coming from---was it fear, was it actually--”Get off of him!”

The aurors weren’t paying any attention to her, all they were doing was swirling those damn magical handcuffs aroudn Braith! What could he have possibly done? What could Braith, who was like--the nicest guy in the bloody world---have done to get assaulted by a hoarde of aurors?!

“You are under arrest for conspiring with You-Know-Who as one of his followers----”

Her hand flew to her mouth. What? No, no, that wasn’t---his family had sneered at her, of course, and----no, no! “He’s not, he---” Panic, panic, everyone was going to---Braith couldn’t be a death eater, that meant he’s killed people, that meant he thought that people like her were a disgrace, that meant that her son was a stain on his family tree and that---what if they started to think that she had helped him? What if everyone thought that she supported He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and they would take her baby away? What if---he couldn’t be a death eater, he couldn’t have killed anyone----

She was roughly grabbed in the arm and tugged away as the aurors began to lead Braith out of the flat. Maggie couldn’t tear her eyes off of him, even though she felt like every last inch of her body was on fire. Everything hurt, everything hurt so bad and it wasn’t until the auror grabbed a hold of her shoulders that she realized she could barely stand.

“Braith!” she shouted after him, doubling over and bursting into tears at the pain and shock.

His mind was racing -- yes, things were going far too fast for their own good right now. He couldn’t even begin to think of what he was going to say to explain this to her, to explain this to -- well, the baby. A fat lot of good that would do now, because he was certainly going to Azkaban and all this nonsense about trying to be a ‘good guy’ and be a Death Eater would all be for nothing, because they weren’t going to care one lick about him trying to kill as few people as possible.

His eyes snapped to Maggie when she doubled over and he gritted his teeth again, starting to struggle against the bonds holding him for the first time. “She’s --- bloody pregnant,” he snarled to the nearest Auror, “And you know damn well a baby has never done anything to harm you. Get her to a healer!” Or she was going to die, and that was something he wasn’t sure he could handle.

Sure, the situation in which they’d gotten into all this wasn’t ideal, but he had found the idea of being a father more and more appealing as things had gone along. It was too late for all that now, though, and all he felt was overwhelmingly guilty. He’d really been fooling her all along, hadn’t he? So he deserved this right now.

“I’m sorry,” he shouted desperately, trying to lock eyes with Maggie. He hoped endlessly that she would believe him, but somehow he doubted that she would.