Chapter Text
After the Fell Winter, soulmates were done away with. It wasn’t only after the Fell Winter, however, but it was after the Desolation of Smaug, the Battle of the Fire Armies, the Eruption of Mount Doom... It was after everything, after all the things that had come to ruin the earth, all the wars and the corruption and the betrayal. The world had to be cleansed; humanity had to start over right from the very basics.
They collectively came to call it The After, because that was exactly what it was. After the war, the world became perfect. The world became a specimen of quality, of process and improvement and rebirth that had come to be absent of even a single flaw. It was pure, simple, transparent perfection.
Perhaps a better name for it was regulation.
The After left things regulated. Left the world a place of control and management and symmetry. For all intents and purposes, each function of living was set in place with equality as its main purpose, and that included the function of humans, too. Everything, all parts of the world, were now perfect. Regulated. Education, medicine, the government. Media, publishing, the workforce and even the air that they breathed. All of it was carefully controlled, carefully supervised and carefully administered, even right down to the way houses on a street looked and who married who.
Perhaps that was why The After felt like how The Before sounded.
Soulmates – or the concept of them, at least – seemed like a whispered story, one that should never be told for fear of retribution. It was a concept that seemed frightening to think about because if one did, then surely all the wrong people would hear their thoughts. To think of stories like that, of soulmates, was a forbidden temptation, was one they should never consider.
So they didn’t.
But that didn’t mean they did nothing about it.
If soulmates were real, or had been real, then Bilbo wanted to know about them. In the forbidden stories, there were always ways to tell who was one’s soulmate – matching tattoos, hair that changed colour, a timer ticking down on a wrist… If they were real, then those who wished to seek a soulmate out had to find other ways to do it, because it was different now. There was no place for marks in skin and abnormalities in The After. It wasn’t perfection. The world was different. It was The After, and all things were regulated.
Nothing was left up to chance, because if humanity had the chance to choose, then they would always choose wrong.
As he grew older, Bilbo thought that making mistakes wasn’t as daunting as he’d been taught it would be. He thought that maybe the world would seem a little more beautiful if there were mistakes. If he had a name for the coldness in his chest when he was awake at a very late hour, if he knew what people had done to soothe their shaking during The Before, if he could explain to someone else why they made his fingers tingle – surely, then, wouldn’t The After be more perfect? Perfect in its imperfections.
As it was, imperfection didn’t exist. Imperfection led to rule breaking. Rule breaking led apologies, to discipline, to punishment. Breaking a rule meant that one had to be forgiven, or that had to be reassigned to Elsewhere.
Elsewhere sounded nice, if only he knew where it was, and what people did there. They were taught that going to Elsewhere meant one of two things – the first was the pleasant one, the one where a person had earned the right to live there, to observe all of its perfections and all the luxuries it had to those who deserved it. The Elderly and the Exceptional went to Elsewhere. The other Elsewhere, however, was for retribution, for punishment. For reassignment.
It sounded less like reassignment and more like reconditioning.
He didn’t know what The Before had that had been taken away by The After, but he greatly missed whatever it was. It was as though someone had taken a piece of him, one he had never quite noticed, and reassigned it to Elsewhere, to a place he could never go. When he thought about it for any duration of time, a hole opened up in his chest, one that he didn’t know the words to explain. Even though he’d press his hand over his heart just to doubt check it was still beating regularly, the feelings were still impossible to describe. He simply did not know the right words, did not know if they existed.
He thought that perhaps the missing piece might, in fact, be a soulmate – that the stories were true, and the piece of him that was missing had always belonged to another. There weren’t many people that thought the same things as Bilbo, but there must be some. For all its glaring perfection, The After wouldn’t need words like reassignment and discipline if there were no problems to fix.
Bilbo’s assigned work was at the Mending Centre. There he fixed scraped knees and diagnosed fevers and made sure that birth mothers were healthy. He was not a doctor, not yet, but that seemed to be the career path that had been chosen for him. Though he wasn’t sure why he was assigned to the Mending Centre at his Ascension Ceremony, the ceremony from which all students in his age bracket were assigned their pre-careers, he didn’t particularly dislike it. There wasn’t anything he particularly disliked – it was all too perfect.
He’d heard of something, just fleetingly, once before at the Mending Centre. It had been spoken in hushed voices that spoke no more than a few words before suddenly disappearing. Something called a SoulBand. The SoulBands, they were… curious. Or was it he that was the curious thing? The concept of curiosity was still foreign, and hard to grasp. It was a word he’d overheard, not learned, and he did not quite know what it meant. With his work at the Mending Centre, he was allowed the opportunity to meet many people. Rarely, a person would be different. Being different in itself was rare and curious, too.
The people that were different were the ones who had a SoulBand. It was an unnoticeable something, a something inserted into their skin just under their wrists. When he touched their skin, he felt it, pressing upwards. Perhaps if anyone else had done the same it would have gone unnoticed, but he knew better. He knew better than to say anything about it, too, but when he realised what they could do...
Suddenly, finding a way to get one for himself was an idea that consumed him. A SoulBand was forbidden, for it was breaking a rule. Breaking a rule would lead to reassignment. But breaking a rule would lead to a soulmate. Was it the right thing to do, to find a soulmate? He might have been unable to keep the soulmate if he did. In the end, who he married and who he had a family with was not for him to decide. His choice would lead to imperfection.
Imperfection was starting to seem a little more desirable.
In the end, it had been easy to find where to SoulBands were coming from. He cornered a patient, held their wrist, and they just knew that Bilbo was aware of the tiny something that would lead them to their soulmate hidden in their skin. He wanted one for himself, and when he knew where to get one, it had abruptly seemed quite obvious.
In their perfect society, there was one outstanding person who was so different from the rest that it was easy to believe he was nothing spectacular. Thinking of him and not thinking of him were the very same thing, for he was important, but he was also no one significant. He was replaceable. Expendable. He was called The Holder of Conscious, and he did not have to follow the same rules as all the others. Before, he had been a she, and before she, she had been a he. There was always a Holder of Conscious. As the only person who was different, it made sense that he would be the one to gift soulmates. He could help.
Yes, imperfection had become desirable, and Bilbo wanted it.