Chapter Five

Incoming

Laundry day was always a hated day for Maggie. There was no machinery to set up and walk away from, and no means to make any part of the job easier. She sat at the river's edge with a few of the other hobbit women, all of them with their baskets of clothing in various stages of routine cleaning. In front of her was a stone that was half-dipped into the river's gentle current, beside her a basket with soiled clothes and then to her other side a row of chatting females.

It was almost a strange comfort to listen to them. Maggie really couldn't follow their conversations. They either spoke far too quickly or kept their voices hushed. They ignored Maggie for the most part once they realized she couldn't participate in anything they asked of her. The women would sing or gossip, loud cackles would escape them at something funny, and on the rare occasion a stone or two was tossed at one another.

'For all that they preach on being proper and respectable, they act like school girls.' Not that Maggie minded since it was definitely entertaining to watch the women allow their cares to drift away in the water. Their hands worked quickly on their bundles and Maggie could only struggle alongside them like an infant learning to walk. The stone helped a little, but there was only so much that she could do to clean out Bella's maternity clothes or Bungo's gardening pants.

Belladonna wouldn't even lend her a bar of soap and explained that to use such a thing on a basket of clothes was wasteful (Maggie still cringed, even months later, at the thought of no soap for clothes). It was only until Maggie had actually seen the crystal clear waters that ran through the rivers that she relented in her protesting. 'And maybe parasites aren't a thing?' She wouldn't fool herself over that one. Soon enough, the early morning sun had dragged itself through the sky to noon and Maggie's load was finished long after the other ladies had departed.

The first few times she had offered to do laundry, she had struggled with her bulk and the bulk of the basket. Her knees would continually get in the way and knock the damn thing out of her hands, or her hips would be too big to securely rest the weaved monstrosity upon them, or even better – her arms jutted out from her side and she looked to be carrying a wheel-barrel rather than a basket. In the end, she had settled for a method she had seen on the cultural show back at home.

Funnily enough, the basket rested quite comfortably at the top of her head. She was even getting better at walking up the road without using her hands to hold it steady. Of course, such a method got her some odd looks from a few (everyone) of the passing hobbits and neighbors. Bungo shook his head at the sight of it whenever she did arrive back from the river with the basket on her head, but Belladonna would only laugh.

"Dwarves must use their hard heads for something, I suppose!" The mother-to-be would tease. It was the least she could do, though. Maggie had no skill for gardening, even if she could remember the names of the plants and herbs. She had no skill for carpentry or for stonework (which got her even more odd looks from the hobbits) and she could barely use her hands to write in her journal. Laundry, dishes, and house cleaning were approachable and attainable goals. Besides, Bag End was enormous and gave Maggie plenty to do on the slow days when Bella's ankles got the best of her and Bungo was out into town.

The newly washed clothes were set up to dry on a strong cord of straw and wool set between two deep-dug posts. The afternoon breeze was gentle and would dry the clothes in no time, and then she could retrieve them and start to fold and put them away. It wasn't the life she had envisioned for herself when she escaped her home and went away to college (to be fair, there was a lot more modern technology involved and not so much menial work), but it was steadily becoming an acceptable one.

'Now if I could only do without the beard.' Belladonna and Bungo had made it clear that they knew very little of the dwarves' culture and they took their cues from Gandalf. They had their own language, history, and cultural respects, but because they were such a secretive people, even Gandalf was hard pressed to share anything with her.

("You are lovely, my dear." Gandalf set his cup down on his saucer and smiled at her amicably. "For a dwarrowdam, you are quite fetching."

"What is word?" Maggie asked around her chuck of roast. She swallowed thickly and blushed hotly when Gandalf only chuckled at her display of bad manners. It had been a long day and she had missed breakfast and lunch, much to Bella's horror.

"Fetching. Fetch. Ing. You are… hm." He paused and brought a gnarled hand to his face, smoothing his fingers down the sides of his cheeks and to the tip of his chin. "Lovely. Your beard is coming in nicely and you look like a sturdy boulder."

Maggie blinked, "Did you… I am rock?" 'Did he really just call me a rock? I look like a rock?' Gandalf's rumbling laughter echoed through the hallow kitchen and he shook his head at her. His hand left his face and reached for hers that was forgotten beside her plate.

"For dwarves, my dear, your features are acceptable." Gandalf left it at that.)

"Rock my ass… old fart." Maggie muttered with bitter amusement. Really, the old wizard wasn't so bad. He visited on occasion and spent his hours with Belladonna more than Bungo. The male hobbit wasn't annoyed by the wizard's visitations per say, but he made no effort to openly participate in Bella's questioning of faraway places and the wonders of the world. Bungo was very much a homebody and enjoyed the seclusion of his home and the warmth of his hearths.

Belladonna, to Maggie's amusement and wary curiosity, was very much a party girl or as much as one could be in this type of world. She loved stories, adventure, trinkets that Gandalf returned with for her, old books and new maps. It broke Maggie's heart sometimes, because she caught Bella staring out through the living area's window with a distant gaze and a faint smile on her pretty face from time to time. It was no hard thing for Maggie to imagine the little creature out in the muddle, running for all she was worth through the forest and grinning like a mad fool.

'Since when did I start using phrases like that? Mad fool. God, I've lost it.'

On occasions like that, Maggie couldn't help the drift of her gaze to Belladonna's now-near-bursting stomach. It was all at once and then not at all that Bella appear to be ready for motherhood. A spirit like Bella's was hard to tame and even in marriage, her husband held no control over her fire-starter nature. Maggie wondered what the child would do to her and fear would creep into her mind.

Would Belladonna be like Maggie's own mother? A life cut short for motherhood and children? Would the child create a bridge too long for Bella to cross and be who she is without sacrificing her life or the life of her child? Would emotional distance become an issue? Would the child be lonely? Would they feel like they had taken something special from their mother and could only watch her rot away?

Maggie hesitated with a shirt in her hand and it slipped from the swaying rope with the rest of the clothes. She took a moment to turn back and glanced over her shoulder at Bella behind her as the woman worked in her garden, the flowers praying in the breeze around her and her voice in a quiet hum of contentment and peace. Maggie swallowed and went back to the laundry in her grip, her eyes shut against the tears that suddenly sprang into her eyes.

'She won't be like that. There's too much of something in her to be like that…'

…

"Maggie."

The dwarf came up with a start and grunted with surprise as she peeled away a piece of parchment that stuck to her face. Maggie gave a hard blink and pressed her blunt thumb and index into the corner of her eyes near the bridge of her nose. She nearly poked too hard into her eyeball and it watered with warning. Maggie cleared her throat and looked around the darkened living area and tittered on the edge of her bench.

"Bella?" Maggie croaked. The room was dark and the fire was low. Night had fallen while she dozed at her desk over her journal. Maggie blinked again and put a fist to her eyes as she turned on her seat. Belladonna stood at the mouth of the hallway and seemed to be hunched over with her hand at the bottom of her stomach.

Suddenly, Maggie was painfully awake.

"Bella," her words were clearer and she stumbled up from her seat as Belladonna hobbled closer to her. Immediately, Maggie tripped over a vase of flowers and the thing cracked and came to waste under her bare feet, but she could care less about the broken and glittering pieces. Her thick hands took a hold of Bella's shoulder and another took her hand to steady her.

"Bella, where Bungo?" Maggie asked brokenly, her accent and pronunciation a train wreck in the slowly mounting chaos of her thoughts. Where was Bungo? Was she in pain, did her water break, was something wrong with the – Belladonna was finally moved to a chair and the woman's face pinched with pain. The hand that gripped Maggie's fingers was tight and it shook, but Maggie couldn't tell if it was from pain or nerves.

"Gamgees. Go. Get him. Hurry!" Belladonna's words fared no better in their deliverance. Maggie only held onto the woman's hand tighter and hesitated. She shook her head and knelt beside the panting mother.

"Cannot. You pain, no is good." Maggie stuttered with frustration. She vaguely remembered where the hole for the Gamgees' family was and she could possibly get there without taking a wrong turn down a hill and becoming horrifically lost, but at the moment that wasn't a risk she wanted to take. Bella, on the other hand, was not about to have her emotional turmoil. With a hard frown of her brow and an angry glint of steel in her eyes, Bella's grip released Maggie's fingers and shoved at her shoulder.

"Now, Margaret. Go. Now!" The last of it came out in a hiss and Maggie found herself wiggling with frighteningly ungraceful stumbles to obey. Another piece of furniture met its untimely end with an impact from Maggie's hammer of a knee and she would have laughed at the wildly broken chair but a sudden gasp of pain from the woman she was leaving behind told her very clearly that now was most certainly not the time to be laughing about wayward limps and their misfortunes.

Maggie burst from the front door and the poor patrolling night watchman nearly came to grief with his lantern down the hillside. She had no time to stop and barked an apology to him (it might have been in English, shit) and thundered down the pathway toward the Gamgees' hobbit hole. She was alarmed by the sound of hooves following her, but when she turned to look over her shoulder, there was nothing. 'It's your own goddamn feet, you fuckin' mammoth, just go!' Despite the night's cover, her vision was clear and bright and she found the turn she needed to reach her destination.

Her feet upheaved a good chuck of earth from the path as she gripped a fence pole and did her best to turn on a goddamn dime but that didn't happen as gracefully as she would have hoped. Maggie hopped on the toes of her feet and winced as rocks bit into her ankles, but she continued to fly until she spotted the hole she was looking for, 'and there's Bungo just leaving!'

Bella's husband was halfway through the hobbit-y longwinded goodbyes when Maggie came to a staggering stop into Hamfast Gamgee's gate. The poor gate was just wrecked from the weight of her body slamming into it full force due to her inability to control her own mass and Bungo reared up with a lecture ready at the tip of his tongue. 'Oh for the love of God, now is not the time for hobbit propriety!' Maggie reached out and snagged Bungo by the front of his coat and hauled him forward.

"Bella, baby, help – shit!" It was as far as she managed to get before Bungo shoved her back with his little self and bolted past her, his eyes wide with alarm. Hamfast's voice came into sharp detail and before Maggie could make sense of what he was saying, the hobbit disappeared into his hole. Maggie growled slightly ('Bella's having a baby and you're going back – whatever!') and turned on her heavy heel to gallop back the way she had come.

The door was wide open when she arrived and she didn't stop to clean off her feet (as she normally did when entering Bag End) before trotting through the hallway with the sounds of gasps and half-yells guiding her. Bungo had taken his wife from the living area and by the time Maggie had caught up with them, they were nearly halfway to the bedroom.

'Now or never, Margaret!' She would have die from embarrassment otherwise, but her friend's pain twisted a knot in her chest so painfully that it choked her. Maggie swooped in from behind the couple and willed her limbs to use that obscene strength that lurked in her muscles. Belladonna yelped in surprise and Bungo hiccupped with his baffled shout, but Maggie ignored them. With the mother-to-be cradled in her arms (and for being such a nugget and pregnant, Maggie was momentarily mystified at the lightness of the other woman's body), Maggie hurried with heavy footsteps to the couples' bedroom.

She deposited Bella onto the feather bed and immediately shot away from the edge of the bed as Bungo came up beside her. Sweat already collected at the edge of Bella's brow and Bungo was muttering to her, his hands shaking and nervously gliding over Bella's convulsing form. Rapid-fire words shot out of Bella's mouth and Bungo only gave his wife a quick nod before shooting from the bedroom like his heels had been set on fire.

Maggie found herself pressed deeply into a far corner of the bedroom. Her body was shaking (though not nearly as badly as Bella's) and fear gripped her legs and kept her prisoner in the shadows of the corner. Bella struggled on the bed, her hands fluttering from one place to another. One held her up against the headboard of the bed, the other held the curve of her stomach and every now and again, Bella gritted her teeth, her heels twisting in the blankets.

'Please don't die,' Maggie felt the fearful thought cloud her mind. 'Please don't let this take you, please, please,' the mantra was cut short as the bedroom door was pulled open and in walked Gilda Hamfast, her apron pristine along her waist, her honeycomb colored curls pulled back into a hasty braid and her blue-eyed gaze narrowed on Belladonna. The other woman marched into the bedroom and rolled up her sleeves and Maggie felt a small wave of relief take her.

'Right. Midwife. Right, right, she knows what she's doing,' the comfort she felt at the sight of Gilda was short-lived, because the hobbit woman noticed her in the corner and jabbed a finger in her direction.

"Margaret. Get me towels, small cloths, warm water and –" Gilda stopped as Bungo reappeared in the doorway with a tray that was laden with a teapot and cups. Gilda snorted and waved him away, "Do not be daft, Mr. Baggins! She cannot have that now, not with the baby, she would just be sick all over the bed!"

Maggie, of course, could understand nothing of this. Gilda's words were like short fire-crackers that snapped and made both her and Bungo jump at the sounds. Bungo's arms shook and the tray's contents rattled with the movement so he hurriedly set the tray down on a stool and left it. Bungo's face had gone deathly pale and his voice was lost. Gilda growled, "If you are not going to help, get out – and take her with you, she's useless!"

There was no resistance when Bungo stepped over and took the sleeve of her dress and hauled her right out the door. Both of them slammed into opposite walls and inhaled giant gulps of air. After a few moments between them, the only sounds coming from within the bedroom (whose door was now firmly shut), Bungo laughed brokenly.

"One would think… we were giving birth, no?" He tried to joke and gave Maggie the smallest of crooked smiles. Maggie shook her head frantically and dropped to the floor; her knees bend and pressed up into her face. Her hurt roared in her chest and she felt herself choke again at her throat, her nerves tightening and creating havoc within her body.

'What is she going to do? There's nothing here to protect her! There's – there's no epidurals, no painkillers, no sterilization, no nothing!' A low and hard yell came from within the bedroom and Maggie shamefully shut her eyes and burrowed into the curves of her knees. Bungo fretted by the door and it mounted onto her guilt that she could do nothing to soothe his nerves, least of all hers!

'What if she loses too much blood? What if,' Maggie took in a ragged breath when another scream came from within the bedroom and Gilda's voice ripped through it with Bungo's name at the rear end of it. The father-to-be hustled down the hallway in a flash and echoes of his movements rolled down the hallway. 'What's going to happen to the baby? There's nothing for him here, what if he gets sick, and what if the midwife isn't enough?'

Bungo soon reappeared and Maggie couldn't bother to bring her head up, she wouldn't have been able to see him through the tears in her vision anyway. She choked on a sob and brought her large hands to cover her ears against Bella's screams. 'God, I'm so fuckin' useless! Why didn't I go to medical school or nursing? Why didn't I take a practical career?! No – no, Margaret had to go and be a fuckin' smartass and take computer graphics! Fat load of good it does me now!'

The door swung open and Bungo tripped out of the room. With a smart snap behind him, the door was shut and he was left in the hallway with her, a dwarf huddle on the ground and wrapped into her knees for dear life. A shuddering exhale escaped Bungo and to Maggie's immense surprise, his arms appeared around her and he hugged her to his chest.

It would have been laughable, really. When she looked back on it years later and told Bilbo the story of his birth, it was hilarious. A small hobbit husband knelt to the ground with his too-short arms wrapped firmly around a hundred-sixty-pound boulder of a dwarf in the hopes that he could comfort both of them amidst Belladonna's painful wails. It was laughable, truly, when it was put into prospective.

It sure as hell wasn't funny right now.

And it wasn't funny for the four hours of labor it took to finally birth the damn kid.

Bungo never once remained still beyond those first ten minutes he took to hug Maggie. He stood and paced and occasionally poked his head into the bedroom (only to be chased out by a bloody cloth that Gilda threw at his head) and he would whine under his breath and twist his fingers together. Maggie was just a waste of space, if she was honest with herself. She couldn't move, she couldn't even bring herself to open her eyes because every time Bella screamed, new tears would come to her eyes.

'Please, please, don't die, don't die on me, please,'was all that would go through her head. Bella had already turned into too much for Maggie to lose. Within the five months that she had spent with the couple, the two of them had become better parents to her than anything she had known before.

She couldn't dream of a morning without Belladonna making breakfast.

She couldn't imagine an afternoon in the living area without Bungo and his lessons for her.

She just couldn't see one without the other and it made her pray all the harder to whatever smoke-huffing lunatic of a Power-That-Is (because really, why the hell was she here anyway?) that Bella survived the birthing. She wasn't so sure about the child just yet, but Bella had to live.

She just had to.

…

The baby arrived early in the morning, on a crisp September day. Maggie wasn't sure how (or why) she had fallen asleep curled into a sweaty ball of flesh against the wall in the hallway, but she had. She felt a shift in the air as the door swung open gently and Bungo dove into the room, calling for his wife. Gilda stepped out with a sigh and her large, hairy feet paused by Maggie's bare toes. Maggie could feel the crust of tears at the corners of her eyes and she wiped at them before looking up at Gilda.

"She is fine." Gilda murmured soft and slow. "It is a boy. Good one. Healthy and strong, he is. Go in, but be quiet and respectful." Maggie could only give the older woman a shaky nod of her head since she only understood every other word, but it was enough, and she stood on trembling legs. Gilda shook her chin at the sight of the dwarf and sighed again before she turned on her heel and made her way toward the kitchen.

Maggie barely caught a glimpse of blood stains up to her elbows and on her apron. She had to hold her breath to keep from vomiting at the sight.

She moved in and instantly became aware that the room was almost unnaturally silent. A fire was crackling away in its hearth near the foot of the bed and Bungo seemed to melt into the edge of the feather-mattress next to his wife, both of his pale hands wrapped around one of Bella's. His knuckles were white and her arm was limp and for just a split second Maggie envisioned a pale and still Belladonna, caught by rigor mortis.

'Stop that, you drama queen. Christ Almighty.' Belladonna rested and Maggie would never tell anyone (even Bilbo) that she waited until she saw the rise of her friend's chest. That single breath allowed an ocean's worth of relief to smother her and Maggie felt her knees threaten to buckle. Her eyes scanned the room and right beside Belladonna was a small bundle of tightly wrapped cloth.

Maggie hesitated after she took a step forward, her eyes on Bungo, but the man was too concerned with the presence of his wife that he paid Maggie no mind as she moved forward toward his child. The baby was washed in shadows from the fire and the darkness of the room and he was still and silent. Carefully and with trembling fingers, Maggie reached down and brought the bundle up into her hold.

At this, Bungo looked up and his mouth opened silently. Maggie froze with the baby halfway up to her chest and she felt new tears spring to her eyes. 'What is with the waterworks, seriously –' but whatever Bungo was going to say was forgotten with a shake of his head. Instead, he smiled weakly at Maggie, "Do you know how to hold an infant, Margaret?"

She fervently nodded and with that, Bungo sighed and allowed her to continue with a tip of his chin. The baby was warm and heavy in her arms and for a brief moment she had a philosophical thought of 'I wonder if this is what being Atlas feels like,' but the thought was gone as soon as her ears caught the quiet coo from the little boy in her arms.

She brought him to her chest and secured him before she gently pushed away the fold around his forehead. Wispy curls appeared and they were spun with reds, gold, and brown hues. His eyes were softly shut, but his mouth popped wide as he yawned with another soft cluck. He was absolutely miniature in her arms and she felt like breathing too deeply with him against her would break him.

Small pointed ears protruded from the curls and a button nose sat in the middle of a face with blotchy-red skin. His nose and eyes weren't even as big as her blunt pinky nail. Everything about him hurt to look at, he was so small and unprotected.

Her vision blurred at the corners of her eyes and Maggie held her breath even as the tears streamed down her face. The creature, the baby, was so small, with pointed ears and floppy feet. Even now, his hair curled like his parents and she knew. It didn't matter if she was stuck here for just now, or forever.

"I'll protect him, Bella," she promised fiercely to her exhausted and quietly sleeping friend, "I promise."

Notes: Yay! We're getting somewhere, at least. Let me know what you think!